Celebrated for his mastery in mark making that captured Black dignity, suffering, and triumph, Charles White has only recently gained acclaim as a devout educator and pioneer in social practice. While his artworks took many forms over the years—spanning the canons of painting, drawing, and public art—they share an emotive formalism, powerful enough to carry the torch of the Black Chicago Renaissance, and speak across the many binaries of the civil rights movement. White only lived to the age of sixty-one, however, his prolific career spanned four decades, and now—four decades later—the full extent of his legacy and influence on generations of artists is finally being lauded by mainstream arts institutions beyond his native Chicago. His stunning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is divided chronologically into six sections, each of which explores a defining era in the artist’s all too short, yet profoundly impactful life.

Throughout his career, White dutifully rejected the dominant images of African Americans in circulation, exercising his artistry as a tool for rectifying misperceptions and reclaiming the narrative of black culture within American history. He once stated, “Because the white man does not know the history of the Negro, he misunderstands him,” and many works in the first section of the exhibition embody this tension between perception and reality. For his 1939 WPA (Works Progress Administration) mural Five Great American Negroes—his first public mural and the first piece one encounters as they approach the galleries—White depicts Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson in vibrant colored oils on canvas. He plays with perspective in this large-scale work to foreground these pioneers in African American history, while simultaneously distorting the background—or terra firma—on which these greats so precariously stand.

White arrived at these figures by working with The Chicago Defender to mobilize the South Side in revisiting the contributions of African Americans to American history, and voting for whom they wanted to see represented on their walls. This gesture would become a recurring theme and position in White’s practice—that African Americans are the authority on the Black experience, and that art can carry this agency, even when the world it depicts can not. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and member of the Sponsoring Committee of the South Side Community Art Center, White’s commitment to arts education is evidenced not just in the social and cultural institutions he helped build there, but also in the collaborative processes behind the creation of his murals.

White came to prominence in an art historical moment of abstraction, thus making his choice to see and depict Black humanity through figuration a supremely political one. White’s early works share an illustrative, expressive style that boast both a formal and cultural accuracy in regarding the black figure—a striking aesthetic quality not, however, to be overshadowed by their blunt political commentary. In his 1939 watercolor Kitchenette Debutantes, White called out the horrific living conditions so many African Americans faced living in overcrowded apartments on the South Side. Here, he lends his skillful mastery of light and color to represent two local women, whose shapely forms occupy the near entirety of the angular window frame. The tension between curve and line—dark and light—amplifies the viewer’s sense of both their cramped quarters, and the vast distance between the American dream and the lived reality of African Americans at the time. Aside from its formal brilliance, the scene bears expert witness to the resilience of the Black spirit and imagination—despite the ways this world would render these women invisible, their gestures and facial expressions affirm their self-determination to find beauty in their surroundings and mirrored reflections.

An artist and advocate in touch with the struggles of his community, White was as committed to representing the injustices they faced as he was to depicting their strength to overcome. In the early 1940s, White continued to speak out against America’s legacy of systemic oppression, deploying the hyper-visible visual language of murals to educate and empower communities of color. During this short period of time, he produced three large-scale murals that drew on his experiences traveling to Mexico with Elizabeth Catlett—a formidable artist and his first wife—and the technical skills he gained working with Mexican printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. As the exhibition moves from White’s Chicago years to the formative time he spent in New York working under the influence of Catlett’s own distinct monumental representations of the bodily form, viewer’s are confronted with a notable shift in White’s work, one that take us from color to black and white, painting to lithography, and the site-specificity of murals to easily replicable works on paper.

In The Return of the Soldier (1946), he explores the historical and disposable role African Americans have played within America’s so-called democracy, first as slaves and unskilled laborers, and then as soldiers and veterans during World War II. Here, we see White making painstaking use of repetitive fine lines, the density of which produces a near-pitchblack scene from which the figures of a policeman and Klan member emerge, as they loom over three Black soldiers huddled together on the ground. White graphically deploys pen and ink to rewrite the story of the African American soldier in its sad truth—how many returned to social injustices in their own country, as violent and militant as war, and far worse than anything they’d seen abroad.

His pro-labor, socialist political stance was ever visible, and in the ’50s he increasingly elevated the image of the laborer by depicting large, spectacularly rendered hands, and bodies of monumental proportions in works such as Our Land (1951) and Harvest Talk (1953). As pre- and post-war America saw a rise in illustrative propaganda, White rode the wave, strategically reproducing his works on paper in ads for black-owned businesses, in leftists journals such as Freedomways, The Daily Worker and Masses & Mainstream, and on album and magazine covers. Iconic works such as J’Accuse #10 (Negro Woman) (1966)—which flanked the cover of a special issue of Ebony Magazine that same year—were widely and regularly circulated, which meant their political messages would reach the broadest possible audience. Despite their commercial or editorial contexts, these works maintained the status of high art, and transcended potential slippage into the flattened realm of illustration.

The exhibition then transitions into his later years, a time when his appreciation for the contemporary contributions of Black people to American history led him to entertainers who—like himself—carried the story and spirit of Blackness in their artistry. At the same time he was building community in Los Angeles amongst Black Hollywood, White began to teach at Otis Art Institute, where he influenced the budding practices of world renowned artists Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons. Through both his love of music and passion for teaching, White continued to explore the social aspects of art that intrigued him, celebrating the power of music and education to put forth a new vision for universal humanity. In his May feature in the Paris Review, pupil Kerry James Marshall finds the perfect words to capture White’s influence, legacy, and skill, stating: “He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach.”

Marshall’s words are pregnant with the possibility that White inspired in others, but also speak to the internal drive with which White continued to push his own practice forward. One gleans in these final stages of the exhibition that teaching had a remarkable influence on White, as students pushed him to reexamine his own form and content. The last decade of White’s career was a period of bold experimentation during which he developed a collaged approach that layered oil painting, drawing, and text. Black Pope (1973), an iconic image for which he might be most well known, depicts a robed Black man in sunglasses wearing a sandwich board who, through a unique combination of gestures and props, takes on a regality and dignity despite the inference that his congregation might be on, and of, the street. A skeleton, crucifix, and the word “Chicago” looms overhead, leaving visitors exiting the exhibition to reflect on White’s message, and singular ability to deploy art as both a language of resistance and tool for social cohesion.

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts is an exploratory case study in institutional racism as it has manifested in the New York City art world over the past half century. Centering public protest as the platform of the oppressed—and, in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “riot as the language of the unheard”—author Aruna D’Souza offers an uncensored look at the role black artists, activists, and their allies have played in forging more equitable practices within the field of contemporary art. In each instance—Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Artists Space’s 1979 exhibition The Nigger Drawings; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind— “artistic freedom” emerges as the linchpin in arguments defending these lessons in cultural appropriation, exclusion, and fetishization. In response, D’Souza interrogates the ethical limitations of freedom,and brilliantly presents all sides of these moral arguments without slipping into an #AllSidesMatter perspective. Rather, she puts her own privilege at risk by applying her intimate knowledge and power of observation to rewrite art history through a broader lens. She adopts a clear stance as ally, defender of truth, and witness who—by her own confession—“strays from journalist to partisan to historian to protester,” as the book unfolds.

D’Souza disclaims her evolving editorial stance early on, characterizing it as a symptom of her shifting intimacy with the key players, institutions and protests that comprise each act. In “Act 1: Open Casket, Whitney Biennial, 2017,” she recounts a series of heated, public debates provoked by Dana Schutz’s aesthetic appropriation of the image of slain and mutilated Emmet Till. Instead of sensationalizing the outrage that the white painter’s appropriative gesture produced in the black community, D’Souza republishes unedited statements by black artists and writers issued on social media and during the Whitney’s public program Perspectives on Race and Representation: An Evening with the Racial Imaginary Institute, which was developed in response to the protests. Quoting Parker Bright, Lorraine O’Grady, Devin Kenny, Lyle Ashton Harris, Elizabeth Alexander, and Hannah Black to name a few, D’Souza abdicates the first pages of the book to those whose lived experiences inform her own art historical research. Through this subversive act, she transforms social media into powerful, primary source material that disrupts the historical role race has played in defining who holds the power to speak freely. While D’Souza publishes Black’s open letter in full, the following excerpt poignantly articulates a root issue explored in all three acts—the aesthetic appropriation, materialization, and commodification of black life:

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.

Adopting a journalistic yet emotionally invested tone, D’Souza places this art historical moment within the broader context of socio-political unrest and moral bankruptcy in this country. She expounds, “The statement went viral—a fact all the more extraordinary because this wasn’t, after all, a meme or a news article or a cat video. It was more like an aesthetico-political manifesto, an invitation to take part in a process of truth and reconciliation, and evidence of an open wound.” Here, D’Souza’s partisan voice rings loud and clear as she underscores the difficult work that lies ahead, and builds upon Black’s argument through a language all her own.

In one of the first reviews of the book, published on Hyperallergic, Steph Rodney criticizes D’Souza for “hedging her bets” through “wishy-washy” language in “Act 1,” a critique that disavows her unique ability to bridge the diverse perspectives she pulls into focus whilst simultaneously asserting her own political voice. Her measured approach is rooted in solidarity, placing deep trust in what has already been written, and inviting those voices to crescendo in unison, conjuring the energy and urgency of protest itself. Knowingly, D’Souza takes up the thread that weaves these complex arguments into coexistence, thus fortifying the protestors’ call for a code of ethics to which we can hold our public institutions—and the voices they themselves privilege—accountable. “Schutz’s claim that she seized on the image of Emmett Till as a way to process the state of recent murders of black youth sounded to many like sidestepping her own relationship to the historical processes that resulted in these deaths,” she explains. “Schutz made Open Casket from an aesthetic and social vantage point that left a glaring blind spot: the complicity of whiteness, and of white womanhood, in those events.” D’Souza practices what she preaches, asserting that empathetic allyship demands a readiness to cede power and privilege over to those doing the work to both dismantle and survive the injustice.

In “Act 2: The Nigger Drawings, Artists Space, 1979,” D’Souza adopts a more distanced tone in retelling this art historical standoff between protestors advocating for publicly-funded institutions to adopt more inclusive practices, and defenders of “free speech” upholding anti-censorship by any means necessary. Here, the precarious intersections of liberalism, capitalism, institutionalism, and race shine through in her tightly-curated series of correspondences between The Emergency Coalition—comprised of pioneers in contemporary black art Janet Henry, Lowery Stokes Sims, Linda Goode Bryant, and Howardena Pindell—and the supporters of Artists Space’s decision to mount an exhibition by a white, male artist entitled The Nigger Drawings. In “Act 2,” D’Souza centers institutions—such as the New York State Council on the Arts and Artists Space—as the starting point of her investigation, a marked shift from her artist-centered approach in “Act 1.” Following suit, she does not begin her critique by discrediting Donald, the artist who arrived at the title of his exhibition by observing his white charcoal-covered arms and imagining himself a nigger. Rather, she begins by studying the cultural infrastructures through which Donald was both enabled and emboldened to outwardly and brashly exercise his white privilege.

D’Souza quickly exposes the glaring ethical and logical omissions to the liberal argument that The Nigger Drawings was a radical, subversive act capable of undoing the violent, racist and white supremacist history of the word nigger. She asserts, “There is a contradiction at the heart of our idea of open dialogue: while it seems to depend on leaving open space for ambiguity, uncertainty, and the contingent, it is grounded in—and perhaps even depends on—de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said.” Once more, D’Souza aligns with the protestors’ call for accountability and peels back the veil used by those in positions of power to assert their own first amendment rights whilst simultaneously sidestepping the difficult conversations that arise as a consequence of their actions. With due diligence, D’Souza also revisits the counterargument put forth by Donald and his institutional allies—that the exhibition delivered value to rather than drew value from conversations on race by ushering us all into a post-black era. D’Souza quotes art critic and editor Craig Owens to expose the absurdity of this claim: “‘Because of the nature of their work,’ he concluded, “the artists who show at Artists Space and avail themselves of its services have…been denied access to the commercial gallery and museum power structure. In this sense, they are all ‘niggers.’” Here, D’Souza delivers us to the same sad conclusion we drew from “Act 1”—that, when confronted with their own complicity, arts institutions and those they sanction would rather intellectualize and formalize racist practices, than take pause to audit and amend their behavior.

In “Act 3: Harlem on My Mind, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969,” D’Souza steps into the role of archaeologist, unearthing the genesis of the contemporary art world’s selective moral compass when it comes to race and representation. She investigates the authenticity of The Met’s claim that the controversial exhibition—which did not include a single black artist—was dedicated “to the people of Harlem—past, present, and future—as a record of their achievements.” In this final act, D’Souza—much like The Emergency Coalition—explores what civic participation looks like between black communities and the cultural institutions that so often exclude and objectify them. She astutely observes that the exhibition “was subtitled Cultural Capital of Black America. The irony of the wording is perhaps only apparent in retrospect. It hinges on the double meaning of capital—a term that refers to Harlem as a place, of course, but also hints at the way in which blackness is traded as a currency, a form of that other kind of capital.” D’Souza resurfaces the forgotten details and unburies the ugly truth that African-Americans were never considered artists or experts in this context and were only granted a seat at the institutional table as artifacts for display.

Whitewalling is a strong call to action in which D’Souza summons her many identities—writer, art critic, feminist, educator, museum consultant, and protestor—to encourage those with a vested interest in sustainable culture to fight for social justice. She exposes the power imbalances that hide within the dark corners of our public institutions, and shines a light on those brave citizens tending to the arduous, daily work of dismantling systems of oppression. And despite its somewhat somber conclusions about the depth of white supremacist roots within the field of contemporary art, this book achieves small yet vital victories: it names those historical offenders who institutionalized racist practices without hesitation or consequence and offers a counter narrative to the biased, historical record; it galvanizes a community of practice and articulates a collective language of resistance across disciplines and racial lines; and it de-vilifies black protest by not just depicting us in our rage, but by also seeing and documenting us in our hope.

Balancing a heavy set of curatorial, editorial, and programmatic ambitions, The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) pioneered a new breed of Biennial this summer that disrupted, disoriented, and dissected the social institutions upholding the monolith of whiteness. On Whiteness was the exhibition arm of the Biennial, a collaboration between The Kitchen—a veteran and vanguard in cross-disciplinary experimentation—and TRII, a budding, interdisciplinary cultural laboratory founded by poet and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine. As part of a larger matrix of initiatives—including an artist residency, symposium, film series, book club, and listening room at partner sites including 47 Canal, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Drawing Center, Recess, and the Queens Museum to name a few—the exhibition served as a flashpoint, sending the embers of heated debates on art and identity politics back into the air. Despite the near half-century between the respective foundings of these organizations, it is clear that the need to hold space for “an interdisciplinary range of artists, writers, knowledge-producers, and activists,” to join forces in affecting systemic change persists. 1

For many involved in this city-wide initiative—from individuals to collectives to institutions—the entry point into the conversation was through defining whiteness itself, and one’s own relationship to it. TRII grounded their conceptual framework in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” an essay by feminist writer and independent scholar Sara Ahmed, that explores whiteness as an “ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space, and what they ‘can do.’”2Here, spatialization is acknowledged as a tool of racialization, and the most self-aware works in the exhibition speak to the institutional space they occupy, whilst engaging in a simultaneous process of dismantling unfettered institutional power. The curators ignited this artistic investigation by asking each artist, how does your artistic practice disrupt perceptual or phenomenological habits of whiteness? In other words, how can the language of art disorient the dominant perspective, or at the very least disrupt the socio-cultural behaviors that both consciously and subconsciously center whiteness?

Artist Baseera Khan explored whiteness as an omnipresent microaggression, whose echo looms heavy in the air. In [Feat ] with lowered ceiling (2018), she mounted a motorized sonic sculpture—comprised of wearable chains, speaker materials, and reflective plexi—on the ceiling at the entryway to the main galleries. With its slow oscillation and crescendo, the work achieved a curious combination of riot and respite that simultaneously drowned out and tuned in on “the volume on whiteness,” which the exhibition’s curators assert has “been turned up,” in this moment. In the gallery guide, Khan expounds upon her approach: “I sleep a lot. In sleep, my mind undoes the daily microaggressions I take in: apologizing for my success, making myself small so that my male counterparts, or whiteness, do not slit my tongue. In sleep, I dream of the important work I do when I wake. And in times where softness is not an option, no family support, no institution, no clan, I swing toward madness as a form of resistance.3Within this scene—which curbs the white, male protagonist of the art world—one imagines the work as a blinged-out mobile rotating above the artist’s place of rest—a container for dreams of an alternate reality, where sleep is free from the nightmare of whiteness, and waking up in the artist’s, “femme Muslim America[n] experience” doesn’t demand a readiness to fight.4

Artist, writer and publisher Paul Chan nodded at white supremacy’s bent for self-aggrandizement in his kinetic sculptural installation Madonna with Childs (2016), despite his markedly brief response to the question of how his installation disrupts white behavior: I’m not aware that it does. But I did edit and publish this. “This” refers to Whitewalliing: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts by Aruna D’Souza. The book—like Chan’s work and the TRII Biennial at large—poses some difficult questions for all those implicated in producing, consuming, and historicizing art and culture. “How [do we] approach the question of what art institutions hang on their walls without asking about the responsibilities of institutions—all manner of institutions—to make space for everyone, or at least be honest about whom they are built to serve? 5And, how do artists “participate fully in the art world even as they challenge its terms?6 In D’Souza’s line of questioning, we see how whiteness lives as both a spatial and conceptual bloc around which the other must navigate, and how institutions can reinforce white supremacy by denying their colonial roots and walling off privileged space. In Madonna with Childs, Chan aptly visualized this unchecked and inflated sense of power in the form of three white, Klan-like figures—made of fabric and mounted atop fans—that whipped and flailed unpredictably, consuming the entirety of the side gallery, less a precarious perimeter around which many visitors dared not tread.

Visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola—known for her strikingly intricate and often monochromatic drawings that discuss race, identity and representation through experimentations with surface texture—approached whiteness not as a diametrically opposed position to blackness, but rather as a single point on a broad spectrum of social invention and theatrical deception. For On Whiteness, she presented two white on white charcoal drawings, and engaged the exhibition’s prompt through a spatial metaphor, asserting in the guide: “I call it, ‘An Evening Show at the Amphitheatre’: where the systems in place, and all members and groups presented, are illustrated in the relationship and placement between a center stage play and the seating arrangements bearing witness.” For Odutola, race operates as spectacle and performance, whose historical narrative might rely on predefined roles, but whose ending has yet to be written. In a neighboring sculpture by Titus Kaphar, this same spectrum between center and periphery—actor and witness—was stunningly captured in blown glass, a relatively new medium for the celebrated painter who is known for the unique ways he, “cuts, bends, sculpts and mixes the work of Classic and Renaissance painters, creating formal games and new tales between fiction and quotation. 7A Pillow for Fragile Fictions (2016), Kaphar placed a transparent bust of George Washington—containing traces of molasses, rum, lime and tamarind—atop a marble, pillow-shaped base. At the time of Washington’s presidency, these rations amounted to the cost of a black life or the ingredients for Colonial decadence, however, in their current configuration, they become poetic allegories for white fragility.

A feat in collaboration and participation, On Whiteness brought together an impressive chorus of voices across perspectives, mediums, and areas of expertise. Organized by, “Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Sara’o Bery, LeRonn P. Brooks, Steven Glavey, Cathy Park Hong, Casey Llewellyn, Claudia Rankine, Simon Wu, and Monica Youn of The Racial Imaginary Institute, and The Kitchen curatorial team,” it embodied an abundance of emotional and professional labor, whilst pointing to the arduous work that lay ahead in dismantling institutional racism and systemic oppression.8 Acknowledging what Ahmed describes as, “orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them,” the Biennial miraculously challenged institutions’ abilities to both embody and reflect an equitable society, without becoming—through proxy or alignment—an institution in and of itself. This was in part due to the numerous programmatic partners who—in an act of solidarity—signed on to stage authentic interventions at their own institutions.9By expanding the conversation beyond their own curatorial premise, and through deliberately inviting contributors to explore whiteness as central to broader discussions on race and representation—but not the center itself—TRII Biennial encouraged us to look both outwardly and inwardly at the structural biases that surround and impact us all.

As I lay in that hospital bed, attached to the machine, in the high dependency cardiac wing, eye bulbous and blurry, the woman in the bed next to me kept calling out to the darkness, “Take me to the lighthouse,” delirious, and I kept wondering how on earth I got here, where on earth my lighthouse was, and how I was going to begin to process it all. 1

A profoundly layered and probing exhibition, Take Me To The Lighthouse posits a simple yet sage premise—that life cuts, water heals, and light reveals even in the darkest circumstances. Earlier this year, Kenyan-British artist Phoebe Boswell emerged from an unrelenting series of traumatic events that served as the genesis for this new body of highly vulnerable and deeply sentient work. In this selfless survey of loss, grief, and triumph, Boswell presents an interlocking web of artistic gestures, in which her trace and pain are perpetually felt.

Minute rectangular voids are clipped from her raging, charcoal seascapes and strewn about the gallery as remote islands, as in You Won’t Hear Me There (2018); intrepid, figurative marks are cast atop the sea of white walls, illuminating a horizon line along which the artist’s self-image rises and sets, as in her site-specific installation Take Me To The Lighthouse (2018); and intimate self portraits are clustered together amidst vast landscape portraits as if to balance the weight of—and collapse the distance between—the part and the whole.

As the titles suggests, the artworks in this exhibition ebb and flow around notions of homecoming and deliverance, each creating sacred space in which to anchor shared explorations of Diasporic consciousness, cultural inheritance, and ancestral debt. As a transnational, multi-disciplinary artist interrogating the complexities of global citizenship, Boswell embraces technology to help navigate various states of being, becoming, and belonging. From a video installation of her body adrift at sea—whose position on the floor demands a posture of reverence from its viewers—to the immersive and undulating waves of spoken word soundscapes that surround it, Boswell translates digital language into a raw, analog, and fluid aesthetic that conjures the mystery of the deep sea. Even her drawings on paper take on a digital aspect, as the voids she cuts from them come to embody pixels that abandon the image of origin to take refuge in those liminal spaces that characterize diasporic existence.

To truly appreciate this exhibition is to dive deep into the world Boswell generously shares and creates—to weigh the anchor on all we think we know of life’s pain, and transcend beyond the self to interrogate suffering as a shared, global reality. In conversation with Boswell’s gallery Sapar Contemporary, it became clear that these intense life events—which took a significant toll on the artist’s physical, spiritual, and emotional health—inspired Boswell to approach this body of work with a sense of urgency, and duty—not just for herself, but for her communities as well.

Perhaps due to the sheer weight of the load—the loss of vision in her right eye, the loss of a lover, the consequent rupture to her physical and emotional hearts, and the medical dependency on others this produced—Boswell entered into deep philosophical investigation, calling upon folklore, oral histories, and her own body to create a shared language for balancing grief. This exploration is strikingly captured in her video, A Broken Heart (2018), which grants viewers a glimpse into the artist’s pain in the form of an angiogram that illuminates her quite literally broken heart. Through this and other visual languages Boswell creates, she asks: Is grief a language in and of itself? If so, how does it sound and what does it look like? Where is it safe to grieve, to give utterance to grief? And which aspects of grief must we hold dear, and which can we cast out?

In her video Ythlaf (2018), the artist floats weightless amidst converging art, personal, and collective histories at the shoreline between Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean. A persistent soundtrack of intense breathwork—activated by visitors’ footfall on floor sensors surrounding the work—weaves together moving images of Boswell lying, dancing, grieving, playing, escaping, and free-floating on the shore, all of which were shot in collaboration with her father, using his drone. A moving meditation, this video affirms the power of water to bring one towards and drive one from the inner self, and notions of family and home. It celebrates the healing power of water whilst recalling the historic traumas water holds, such as the Middle passage and other sad freedoms, visualized in moments where the artist transcends and abandons her own body at the contemplative space between land and sea. Like all of us, water is in a constant state of becoming, and possesses the innate quality of constant change—it freezes, clusters, flows, steams, and ripples in response to its environment. Here, Boswell summons water as a superpower to freeze her pain, buoy her spirit, and flood the dams of her emotional blocks.

Boswell’s biography reads, “Although Boswell was born in Nairobi, she was brought up in the Arabian Gulf. Growing up as an expatriate, she reveals that she felt, ‘amputated from Kenya, in a way,’ admitting, ‘I do not exist there, it is not my place.’ The fragility of her Kenyan identity, and this rootless aspect of her being, ignites her work with a delicate search for belonging, through which her art becomes a vehicle that drives her on her journey home.” 2 Boswell is not alone in this feeling of disjointed or fractured identity—now more than ever, people live at vast geographic and emotional distances from their homelands. Again, enter the role of technology in Boswell’s practice. Recognizing the many living in Diaspora today that rely on the Internet to maintain familial relationships, Boswell uses selfies to shed light on how handheld technology can allow us to exist in multiple places at once, and belong to something greater than our immediate surroundings. In Sankofa (2018), Boswell puts forth a strong and unapologetic image of her nude form—arm flexed, breasts bare and glance direct, Boswell transcends her hospital room at the speed of light, along fiber optic cables and into the world, reborn.

Boswell is nothing short of masterful at adapting her craft to respond to the pressing issues of our times. She toggles between different modes of artistic representation—from portraiture to landscape painting, abstraction to representation—to reveal just how fragile the constructs of identity and community actually are. And this is not an exercise she performs in service of her own sense of belonging—she asserts, “the most personal things are usually the most universal.” Taking her own life as a case study, Boswell expands her autobiographical exploration of trauma, grief, and healing into a broader survey of the body and its challenge to find a home outside itself. In this challenging exhibition, self-portraiture becomes a tool of self-care and a much needed reminder to look back at paths travelled, in shedding the weight of the past and stepping more fully into the evolving selves we all seek to inhabit more mindfully.

Phantom Limb is a solo exhibition of recent works by Ceaphas Stubbs, a New Jersey-based artist who collapses photography, sculpture, and collage into a singular process that yields hyper-layered 2D prints from 3D dioramic still lifes. The exhibition marks the culmination of his six-month residency at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark, a community collaboratory that encourages innovation, collaboration, and experimentation. These perception-defying photographs both conjure and resist the sex appeal of advanced imaging technology, marrying analog and digital processes to produce imagery that is simultaneously nostalgic and afro-futuristic. Stubbs’s eclectic and erotic ecosystems—which he fashions from repurposed detritus and ephemera such as fabric scraps, adult magazines, and found objects—unleash symptoms of yearning in their viewers that can be likened to those of phantom limb pain. In this otherworldly exhibition, Stubbs navigates the innate tension between desire and pain, and unpacks the phenomenology of loss by giving visual language to the persistent tingling, itching, burning, and aching that accompany want.

His creative process is an experiment in itself, a performance that tests the understood limits of photography, perception, and patience. First, Stubbs sets about scavenging materials, which often hold traces of intimacy yet embody only a fraction of a greater whole—colorful, patterned swatches that belong to a larger garment; scenes clipped from photographs rooted in someone else’s memories; and limbs dismembered from sex acts depicted in pornographic magazines. These are then refigured, suspended, anchored, or overlaid into parallel universes using string and wire affixed to a wooden armature. In a final gesture, Stubbs places this armature against a vibrant and textural backdrop, and photographs the tableau to generate a single image, where only shadows remain as remnants of his trace, and the multi-step process.

These flat yet loaded prints toy with viewers’ perception and orientation by eroding the distinction between background and foreground, gravity and anti-gravity. The longer one spends falling head over heels into these works, the more existential questions arise. How can we comprehend desire for something we never in fact held?Do the social and cultural constructs of trauma engender collective suffering? And if life is pain, and love is desire, then what is death? Are we all fated to live, love, and die as masochists? In this meditative space, the works themselves somehow come to embody an expression of deep loss, as dimensions evaporate in the translation from worldly context to artistic studio, kinetic sculpture to static photograph, and static photograph to the wandering eye. However—as with the scientifically inexplicable sensations associated with phantom limbs—even these voids generate unfathomable dimensions and rearticulated relationships in their wake.

Many of Stubbs’s works achieve a delicate alchemy of love and loss, and at times fuse these elements together to summon the heartbreak and rage of unrequited love. In . . .A Touch Here, A Tickle There. . .The Full Lengths of The Bodies Pressed. . . (2018), a hand reaches out, grasping at what appears to be a literal and a metaphorical straw, while nearby backs and necks—arched in ecstasy—never seem to quite connect. In his statement, Stubbs expounds, “First, losing the physical contact of a lover. Eventually most people accept the relationship ending and find ways to move on. That is until we have reason to hope again. The fragmented bodies become the catalyst for hope.”1 Perhaps it is this belief in something beyond the other side of sorrow—be it independence, reconciliation, or acceptance—that allows us to shed the pains that haunt and moor us, and ascend into a vast and limitless future love.

If French is the language of love—and love is central to how we perceive ourselves in the world—then let’s turn to the revolutionary French philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon to comprehend this cosmic romance between hope and reason, the mind and the body. He writes “I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos [. . .] I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia.”2 Here, black magic and black excellence are embodied, and blackness becomes another form of gravity. In works like . . .Stripped of Everything. . .Waiting to be Drained Again. . . (2018), Stubbs suspends a torso amidst a galaxy of stellar debris like a resilient, black star unmoored from the fate of an event horizon and surrounded by a galactic luminescence of its own creation.

Stubbs weaves this push and pull between fantasy and reality through the titling of his works to drive home these underlying tensions: . . .Disappearing Act. . . (2018);. . .His Eyelids Fluttered Down. . .His Heart Floated Away. . . (2018); . . .Easy Come, Easy Go. . . (2018); and . . .To Heal the Troubled Mind. . .The Center Must be Found. . . (2018) to name a few. Stubbs’s poignant use of ellipses subverts the conventions of linear narrative, and instead imagines alternate and orbital endings that leave space for the viewer to transcend their own realities, slip through the trap doors of memory, and revel in the space of infinite possibility that seems only achievable in dreams. In the worlds Stubbs creates, these are wet dreams, where Black intimacy drips from every object and surface. What Stubbs achieves in these strikingly liberated and devastatingly distant worlds is a prototype for living with desire, dismantling the trope of hyper-sexualized black bodies, and inviting unabashed, orgiastic, and radical love to join us down here on earth.

Chlöe Bass is a highly inventive conceptual artist who utilizes every tool at her disposal to unearth the beauty held within the minutiae of the everyday. In this profoundly probing and playful exhibition—which includes photography, text, video, sculpture, performance, a mobile phone app, documentation, and site-specific intervention—visitors engage the philosophical prompts behind her projects investigating self and other, including: “How do we know when we’re really together?” “What is the story told by the distance between two bodies in space?” “How do we share love between individuals and institutions?” In solving these abstract equations of human existence, Bass develops concrete methodologies that visualize the performances embedded in our daily lives, framing our patterned anxieties, behaviors, and spatial relations as art forms in and of themselves.

In The Book of Everyday Instruction—which presents a body of work developed between 2015 and 2018, split into eight chapters—Bass radicalizes the language through which we experience, navigate, and discuss intimacy. She surrenders the role of author in this evolving narrative, and instead approaches each chapter with an eagerness to let the story write itself. Bass imagines a series of interpersonal interactions wherein she shares creative license with her collaborators, an eclectic group of strangers she finds on the internet, through research, and within her diverse creative communities of practice. The Knockdown Center becomes the institutional stage upon which these personal interactions unfold, and rearticulated roles converge.

For Chapter One, Bass posted an ad to the Cleveland Craigslist inviting respondents to do “a thing they would normally do with someone else” with her. This “performance without an audience,” led Bass to teach a prison art class, replace a tour guide’s children on a practice tour, stand in for a teenage clique sick of hearing their friend ramble on about a crush, and go on someone else’s date.1 To visualize these potent social interactions—each of which strikes a delicate balance between trust and vulnerability, patience and impulse—Bass distilled the experience into a set of aesthetically minimal yet striking diptychs. you + me together (2015) pairs Polaroids with texts that describe the exact moment when something happened between the artist and the stranger that resembled intimacy. Here, Bass hones her unique intuition and ability to remain present as a craft, exposing the idiosyncratic skills we carry into social interactions, and celebrating the unparalleled self-discovery that comes from our readings of those around us.

Chapter Two—like the other even chapters in the exhibition—serves as a homecoming: a return to the self, where ideas tested out in the world are further unpacked and augmented through in-depth, local research. After returning to New York from Cleveland, Bass recalls, “I became really obsessed with the idea of the pair relationship inherent to voyeurism. What does it mean to be a pair if only the voyeur knows that the pairing exists?”2 We joked about URL versus IRL stalking, and how surveillance in any form can create a false sense of proximity to and intimacy with another. In Things I’ve seen people do lately (2015), Bass develops protocols of attention that help her to actively observe social interactions in her immediate surroundings and retain the most important details. In one piece she transcribes a record of these interactions from memory a full day after they transpired, and in another, she invites visitors to play with sixty-one transparencies of screenshots she pulled from publicly-accessible network surveillance feeds she watched daily for two months. As a newcomer to Bass’s work, I was immediately struck by the rigor, trust, and self-discipline the artist brings to her processes of social observation.

In Chapter Four, Bass moves beyond her own protocols to experiment with the established sociological pedagogy for proxemics, or the study of how humans use, and communicate non-verbally within, space. Using blank tape measures that she bought in bulk from a gag gift supplier, Bass developed a workshop that invited people to build narratives inspired by the proxemics framework: 18” of intimate space, 4’ of personal space, 12’ of social space and 25’ of public space. Personal stories transcribed onto the blank tape were then revealed and concealed as participants drifted toward or away from Bass who stood still at the other end of the tape measure. The bashful blushing and maniacal laughter this piece produces as participants land face to face with the artist speak to another premise put forth by Bass—that the spectrum between private and public, personal and communal, is not only delineated in our social behaviors and by our shared spaces, but is held within our bodies as emotions and impulses too.

In Chapters Six and Seven, Bass steers her prompts—and her penchant for play—toward abstraction. The Four Phases of Love (2017), four square digital prints, depict diagrams of mounds of spices configured on a plate to symbolically map the love story between an individual and a cultural or social institution. Bass asserts, “Smell and taste are important evocations of experience that humans rely on. I wanted to have some small element suggestive of those things as subtle ways of triggering or indicating memory.” The prints are accompanied by the spices themselves, presented in jars on a neighboring shelf. Visitors are encouraged to open them and take in the scents, triggering their own associations and memories that help to locate themselves within the work. In City Palette (2017), Bass collaborated with 20-year-old Taylor Snead to create a mobile phone app that explores gentrification and what the artist discusses as “chromophobia.” The app invites users to take a photograph of their immediate surroundings, assign their own color codes, observe where whitewashing has transpired, and see familiar surroundings in unfamiliar ways. Inspired by what she describes as the intentionally defunct New Orleans public transportation system—one designed to divide the city along color lines—Bass deploys the app as a tool to collapse binaries and mine the abstract intersections of perception and reality. Though technological in nature, the app actually encourages a return to mindfulness, and invites its users to actively and communally observe and translate the constantly changing world around them.

There is a sense of immediacy and care that Bass brings to her practice that can be felt from Chapter One, and gains momentum from her dynamic—yet often invisible—presence within the works. For this truly multidisciplinary artist, I would add time to the unending list of mediums she uses to explore her subject matter, and patience as a craft she has fine-tuned over the three years this project took to unfold. Her vulnerable, exhaustive, rigorous, spirited, philosophical, heartfelt, and intuitive approach is singular, and invites us to see ourselves and our environments anew. Bass’s commitment to collaboration adds deep temporal and experiential layers to her works, which leave behind traces that can be seen, felt, and even touched—it is clear that Bass allows what she learns from her collaborators to grow and shift her practice in new directions. The Book of Everyday Instruction offers an expanded vision for human love, and is a respite from the reductive ways we conflate intimacy with privacy. Bass reminds us all that it is okay to connect wherever, however, and with whomever we damn well please, even in broad daylight.

For the last century, Harlem has served as a container for popularized hopes, myths, and projections surrounding Black and Latinx cultural production. For many, Harlem holds the nostalgia of an era long gone, one colored by the writings of Baldwin, the riffs of Ellington, and the swag of Baker. For others, Harlem has come to embody a contemporaneity that is built atop yet distinct from its complex history. With the launch of their second exhibition Harlem Perspectives, FACTION Art Projects—a Bristol-based arts collective who recently opened Gallery 8 in the historic Strivers’ Row district of Harlem—chimed in as a new, local voice invested in reinforcing the perception of Harlem as a hotbed for social innovation and cultural entrepreneurship.

The exhibition brings together ten multidisciplinary artists who live and work above 110th street, positioning them as local talent. Despite sharing the geographical context of Harlem, “Jamaica-born Renee Cox, Colombian-American artist Lina Puerta, French painter Elizabeth Colomba, Dominican Republic-born Pepe Coronado, Chilean American artist Virginia Inés Vergara, Moscow-born Leeza Meksin, Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth, African American artist Stan Squirewell, and New York born Elaine Reichek and David Shrobe,”1 challenge viewers to confront their own stance and subjectivity in relation to global issues and identities.

I was first struck by the exhibition’s context—an international group of primarily POC artists grouped by British gallerists seeking to engage “an interesting and eclectic group of people,” in the very birthplace of gentrification in Harlem. For this reason, instead of tracing and deliberating upon the historically fine line between cultural celebration, fetishization, and commercialization, I chose to focus my observations on how these prolific artists decolonize the art historical gaze by interrupting traditional readings and viewing paradigms in their works.

David Shrobe carries the spirit of the exhibition dutifully, as a local artist whose highly-accessible works are constructed in-part from found objects sourced within a few block radius of Gallery 8. In an interview with Black Art In America, Shrobe discusses the rich history of materials, and poetically defines abstraction as a process wherein the artist invites materials to tell their own story.3 In so doing, Shrobe frees our collective imagination from the trappings of social object memory, uplifting the quotidian and inviting viewers with differing levels of art literacy to see themselves and their neighborhood reflected in his works.

Stan Squirewell similarly refigures inherited materials, turning to the relics of ancient civilizations to address lingering existential questions that continue to confound us today—“How did we get here? Why are we here? Where are we going?”4 In his vibrating, mixed-media collages, Squirewell adorns biblical figures—such as Melchizedek, Lilith, and Eve—with fabrics whose patterns hold the symbolic visual systems of our ancestors, reminding us to look to history in imagining a shared future. Lina Puerta also engages memory, abstraction, and the inherent shape of things, allowing, “her artistic process [to be] guided by the physical qualities of [her] materials.”5 This willingness to surrender to the material world—which for Puerta is a robust spectrum of textures and colors, spanning from artificial plants to lace and leather—offers a striking alternative to consumerism, and sheds new insights on how to consider one’s own identity and agency in relation to the things we own.

Renee Cox and Elizabeth Colomba are also concerned with ownership and cultural property, and use photography and painting respectively to test the artworld’s readiness to confront its own privilege and power. Both artists foreground black figures in positions of power within scenes of leisure and decadence, privileges once reserved for upper class whites. In The Signing (2017), Cox stands amidst a sea of fancifully dressed people of color as they bear witness to the signing of a declaration. In Chevalier de St. Georges (2018), Colomba destabilizes the art historical gaze through a complex matrix of unrequited glances—the mirrored reflection of a woman holding an apple looks longingly upon a dapper man, who gazes upon a portrait, whose subject stares straight into the eyes of viewer.

For many in Harlem Perspectives, making art is synonymous with subverting tradition, and I only wish these artistic gestures and political interventions were discussed more thoroughly in relation to the legacy of activism and radical creativity in Harlem. Upon leaving Strivers’ Row, I meandered through a more familiar and visceral experience of our neighborhood, whose tune was louder, grittier, and more expletive than that of the pristine gallery. As someone complicit in the vetting systems that often reinforce the binary constructions of the artworld—art/craft, local/global, emerging/established—I too thirst for the community-driven and site-responsive exhibition model FACTION strives for in this exhibition. And, as a neighbor to both Gallery 8 and these amazing artists, I look forward to working together to shift professional attention and resources towards our neighborhood, and those named and unnamed artists who embrace risk every day by envisioning and actualizing the world we want to inhabit, together.

Over the past decade, the community of artists of color who retell American history by remixing and repurposing its archives has reached fever pitch. From Derrick Adams’s inventive adaptations of politically-charged designs by black fashion pioneer Patrick Kelly, to Firelei Báez’s reimagining of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party to grant women of color their rightful seat at the table, artists are resurfacing visual languages from the past to comment on contemporary socio-political culture. Notably, these temporal investigations and reclamations also serve to uplift the long lineage of African-American changemakers who are all too often omitted from the archives altogether.

In this way, archives—which find home in our public institutions, private residences, and online—have come to embody sites of radical imagination. Now more than ever, artists are critically engaging the cultural objects, ideas, tools, and ephemera that have shaped—and take the shape of—our inherited past. Celebrated conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas has long tapped the well of popular media images, illuminating trends in American consumption across socio-cultural spheres, and prompting us to take stock of our investments. In What We Ask Is Simple, Thomas turns to international activism, sourcing iconic protest photographs from “libraries, historical archives, and years of online research,”1 to undergird this impressive new body of work.

It’s difficult to recount the experience of viewing these works without first describing their odd context—dimly lit galleries with wall signage that, in what might be an art historical first, actually encourages flash photography! While light is well understood to erode the surface qualities and archivability of an artwork, Thomas presents a series of polydimensional screenprints on retroflective vinyl whose formal qualities are markedly enhanced by iPhone torches and light beams. If you are a science novice such as myself, retroflective materials are typically used to increase the nighttime conspicuity of something or someone—a poetic metaphor for drawing meaning out of the dark, or illuminating a subject who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Once aglow, these seemingly abstract images pull into sharp focus, foregrounding historic African-American change agents—such as Shirley Chisolm, Dorothy Counts, and Gloria Richardson—amidst the metallic, painterly brushstrokes. As the viewer moves around and between the works, heightened levels of detail emerge.

Thomas forges an alternative universe in this exhibition, whose rules of engagement center black protagonists, and activate technology as a political device for reframing historical narratives. The more time spent free-falling into the depths and dimensions of works such as I Am an American Also (flash) (2018) the less simple one’s questions become. For example, in We want equal—but...(II) (2018), how is it possible that white figures can emerge from black space, and black figures from white space, all within the same frame? And what does this transposition say about the historical assumptions that have been projected onto the binary construction of race in this country? In this moment of questioning I became hyper-aware of the role technology has played—both then and now—in helping to right, write, and rewrite the history that contextualizes the archive.

As I riffed on the conceptual intersections of archives, activism, and the American dream—and imagined the now-digital archives of protest imagery we create every day—the myth of American progress felt more real than ever. From Facebook Live videos of black men, women, and children slain in broad daylight, to viral tweets of videos depicting police brutality against unarmed civilians, technology has become increasingly important in documenting social injustices and holding oppressors accountable. And it, like archival memory, is fortified by collective use—#blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, and #itcouldhavebeenme have become tragic yet vital repositories of personal images that help us to collectively remember those we’ve lost.

In works such as Four Little Girls (blue and white), Pledge, and Power to the People / I'm too Young to Vote (black and gold)—all 2018—I was struck by the hope and heartache I felt as I encountered images of children advocating for an equitable future that has yet to come. I wondered how the brave and resilient young people pictured engage the struggles of America today, and grew angry as I traced the waves of so-called change spawned by the 20th-century movements Thomas so powerfully re-postures. And for a brief moment, the writer and the artist in me joined as one to proclaim that the narratives we construct bear the same cultural weight as the images that capture them. For those like Thomas who dare to engage the complex, conceptual terrain between the fact and fictions of history, archives—in both their analog and digital forms—become a powerful medium, that empowers artists to author distinct and fresh accounts of what was, what is, and what might become.

Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 is not the systematic web of blunt perceptions the exhibition’s title would have you believe. With nearly three-hundred works spanning the entire sixth floor of MoMA—a first for a living artist—the exhibition demands its audience bring with it a willingness to work, both objectively and subjectively, for reason. For me, this was an isolating experience as I struggled to flow with the uncontested praise that’s accompanied this seminal, far-reaching exhibition. While I have always valued the profoundly poetic explorations of self and community found in Piper’s earlier works, I experienced a crisis of conscience as I moved through the final galleries.

My own intuitions felt shamefully in conflict with those rendered visible by the artist whose brave work has opened doors for a liberated woman such as myself to find footing in this world of institutionalized art. The emotional labor it took to weather Piper’s persistent and at times injurious provocations, as in Imagine [Trayvon Martin] (2013)—alongside the series of moral negotiations I encountered as the exhibition shifted perspective from self to other to othering in its depictions of black bodies—left me in pieces. I had longingly prepared myself for the instigation that has come to define many of Piper’s bold gestures as an artist, however, I was wholly unprepared for the sunken place I found myself in as I stepped out of the exhibition and back into my very black, American life.

What follows is a hypothetical interview with the artist who, to my knowledge, no longer grants them and has expatriated to Berlin:

Q: An important subtext to your early drawings is the role of the then-legal drug LSD as the genesis of self-portraiture in your practice. During your late ’60s self-exploration in altered perception, the concurrent Black Arts Movement and Civil Rights Movement was awakening a collective black consciousness and imagination. What do these early self-portraits reveal about how you saw yourself at that time? Did your experimentations in liberation from the body—your body—also imagine the liberation of other black bodies?

Q: In the Vanilla Nightmares series (1986), you combat notions of white fragility and privilege by appropriating and repurposing pages from the New York Times as a canvas for your own figural ruminations on race. Nude black figures engulf and penetrate the headlines of American history, challenging their veracity and offering an alternate reality. In your self-portraits—specifically Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981) and Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995)—you name race more directly in your lingual framing of the works. As an artist, do you think it is easier to discuss race through a self-referential lens when language is at play?

Q: The Mythic Being series marks a seismic shift in your practice—performance art seems to untether your gaze from self and open up metaphysical terrain in which to imagine and refigure the other. Your body becomes a powerful medium, and embodied gestures expose and redirect the projections of others onto your identity and form. I imagine you learned a great deal about those you encountered as your alter-ego. What did this process teach you about your physical, spiritual and emotional selves?

Q: As an artist whose unyielding work has often explored the social constructions that put democracy at risk of self-deconstruction, what communities do you consider yourself to be a part of? How and where do these communities—and the theoretical audiences for your work—intersect? In what ways are you present and absent for these interactions?

Q: Many responded in arms to Dana Schutz’s, Open Casket, depicting slain Emmett Till in the 2016 Whitney Biennial. This uproar marked only a recent chapter in the mounting resistance to the spectacle and consumption of black death in art. It also rearticulated a set of unspoken rules around representation, solidarity, and the materialization of other’s trauma. In your opinion, what do works like Free #2 (1989) and Imagine [Trayvon Martin] (2013)—which depict a lynching, police brutality, and Trayvon Martin’s face obscured by a crosshair—add to this conversation? And, in the ironic titling of these works, how does your summoning of “liberation” and “imagination” resonate against the lived experiences of these slain black men?

Q: As an expatriate who has selectively disengaged from the very real trappings of race and nationality, how do you see and engage the struggle of black America today? I’ve heard that you no-longer identify as black, and have shed that aspect of your identity for purple. How does the privilege of purple intersect with making work about the black experience?

Q: Upon exiting the galleries, I participated in The Rules of the Game #2, a performance installation in which I signed a certified contract with you, binding me to “always mean what I say,” a promise I am privileged to make. As someone now bound to you, I wonder in what ways you feel and are bound to me, and what form this conversation takes if you don’t show up.

"I’m listening to music all day—in the shower, when I’m commuting, when I’m joyriding, thinking about making work, and when I’m in the studio actually getting to it. Constant stimuli. You know me, I dance around all the time!" —Sable Elyse Smith

Maker’s Mixtape celebrates artists whose practices animate processes foundational to the mixtape format—compilation, splicing, collage, looping and overlay. By remixing diverse source materials and juxtaposing voices to establish complex narratives, both recording and visual artists have transformed popular understandings of what it means to be a maker in the twenty-first century. Inviting visual artists to share the songs that motivate them to create, Maker’s Mixtape draws meaningful connections between inspiration and process.

With musical inspiration spanning the vast cultural terrain between trap and art rock, interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator Sable Elyse Smith bends genres even in her sleep. An undoer of language and seeker of truth, Smith unearths memories and traumas to produce works that are equal parts bold and quiet, personal and universal. It comes as no surprise that her top ten songs would—like her artwork—aim right for the deepest parts of you, infusing your day with both meditation and exclamation.

Her visceral collages, videos, and text-based works deploy repetition and fragmentation to dissolve understood boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the real and the imagined. In her own words, Smith’s practice explores “the intersection of cinema, language—particularly the written text—and image-making: construction, deconstruction, and abstraction.” To imagine the poetic intersections of these distinct modes of making is to turn up the gritty soundtrack to a joyride with Sable Elyse Smith.

1. Rihanna – Bitch Better Have My Money

Back in 2015, at Skowhegan, Troy Michie and I shared a studio wall that didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. So everyone had to listen to the playlist we created, song-for-song—and to us dancing and yelling to each other over the wall. This was on there right at the top, and still is.

2. SBTRKT ft. Sampha – Trials of the Past & Hold On

You got to play ’em back to back—it’s crucial! This is how I get ready in the a.m.—listening to Sampha, wishing I could sing, and mentally making my to-do-list for the day in the shower. Game face songs!

With a vested interest in both artists and the sociocultural conditions that shape art, the Public Programs & Community Engagement Department is rearticulating its collective impact model to center art, community, and participation in equal measure. Looking ahead to The Studio Museum in Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary—and the construction of our new, purpose-built home on 125th Street—we have entered into a liberal and de-spatialized moment of self-reflection, anchored by a desire to listen and learn from our neighbors as we continue to grow.

We began this transition by reflecting on our journey as an institution. What is the Studio Museum without the physical structure that has supported our work for most of our history? How can a museum without walls deliver its mission and work beyond preexisting platforms and into a whole new realm of possibility? What does it mean to be an institution in flux, rooted in a place that is also undergoing a radical transformation? And how does a museum that is building capacity for its institutional growth remain responsive on personal and local levels?

In 2016, the Museum piloted inHarlem, series of public art initiatives and collaborative programs that bring the Museum’s programs into the community and partner institutions in dynamic ways. Large-scale artist projects in historic Harlem parks and arts-driven programs in public libraries have served as grounds for innovation where, together with our partners, we aligned institutional missions, melded audiences, and emboldened artists to dream and work on scales previously unimaginable. Our desire to understand the impact of this expanded way of working served as the basis for a newly articulated community of practice at the Museum—the Community Advisory Network (CAN).

Established in 2017, CAN’s primary goals are to support open and transparent dialogue among neighbors, evaluate the depth and potential of the inHarlem program, and provide a structured platform for local voices to both inform and champion the Museum's future work. An esteemed cohort of roughly twenty local artists, residents, cultural leaders, educators, parents, program alumni, and representatives from nonprofits and community-based organizations throughout the neighborhood, CAN has empowered the Museum to understand issues affecting Harlem more comprehensively.

In articulating the importance of this local focus, one advisor who works through local churches asserts, “It's the community that drives the institution. You must continue to inject yourselves into the community...it's the community members and institutions that should be overwhelmingly supporting who you are, now and in your future.”

For the Studio Museum, community has always been at the heart of how we self-identify. The art, people, and ideas that have flourished within these walls radiate the vibrancy and history of our birthplace; they coalesce around a shared pride in all that has been “inspired and influenced by black culture.” Additionally, the Museum grows its family by incubating creative talent and professional development on all levels, from our growing line of artist-in-residence alumni, to the countless cohorts of interns, fellows, educators, and arts administrators that have gone on to impact and expand the field. Our community is ever-growing and ever-evolving. Equally important, we have found community in our home of Harlem, which—in all its concrete realities and mythical projections—has remained the rich well from which the Museum draws. Despite our ongoing commitment to expanding the resources available to contemporary black art and its practitioners, it is clear that more needs to be done to meet new audiences where they are.

CAN’s quarterly meetings serve as a unique opportunity to listen, learn, and draw inspiration from individuals and organizations already conducting amazing work in our neighborhood. Each session is centered on a special topic or framework upon which to build group discussion, and begins with staff presentations that lay bare select material and conceptual processes. This transparency and trust are the basis upon which CAN’s communication is built, encouraging the candid exchange of challenges and best practices across fields, audiences, and silos of work. As such, this network—with the distinct experiences it brings together—is uniquely poised to enact systemic and institutional change that keeps pace with the transformations taking place around us every day. The cohort’s diverse expertise and commitment to making Harlem a powerful place to live and work help shape our approach as we continue to have conversations throughout the neighborhood.

Another advisor with a background in education stresses the importance of a shift in professional attention during this historical moment: “For those departments that have not taken a program’s approach, that's essentially what they’re going to be doing during inHarlem. They’re not going to be able to do the work as it’s been done, through the Internet, Museum space, foot traffic, or brand recognition. Everyone is going to have to create and communicate through relationships--we learn by listening!”

“Relationship Building” was the theme of our kick-off meeting last August. We opened with introductions and first-hand accounts of how we each see, experience, and understand our neighborhood. Many in the group have called Harlem home for their entire lives, and were proud to share fascinating stories from the radical decade in which this institution was founded. Celia Scott-Wickham—a founding member of CAN and cherished member of the Museum’s Arts & Minds program, who has sadly since passed—motivated the group to shed poetics in discussing Harlem’s past and future. A devout Harlem resident whose social justice work spanned institutions such as St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, Minisink Townhouse, the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, Community Planning Board 9, the Central Harlem Partnership, and multiple community empowerment organizations, Celia’s life of public service and arts advocacy continues to serve as a beacon for our work.

In our second meeting, the breakout groups responded to the prompt, “How can the Museum reconsider its visibility—both on 125th Street and throughout the neighborhood—during this exciting and transformative moment?” One group discussed how to mobilize new audiences in the immediate areas surrounding the Museum’s satellite programming and site-specific exhibition spaces. Another group explored how new marketing strategies could help raise awareness among underserved audiences. The last group discussed ways to make the building construction processes transparent and legible for the public.

Supported by advisors representing more than twenty organizations and interest groups throughout Harlem, our department is confident in its growing ability to ensure local voices are reflected in all that we do. With more ears to the ground, we are able to support our neighbors in their work and learn from their triumphs and toils, while translating this knowledge to augment the numerous ways we support artists navigating this shared terrain.

At the midpoint of our first year together, it is clear that there is much work to be done in our neighborhood, on every level. With local issues ranging from gentrification and cultural displacement to illiteracy and ageism, the group has worked hard to acknowledge, give voice to, and share tools with those often overlooked in these conversations. As we step out more boldly in directions not yet traveled, Public Programs & Community Engagement values the community of people who may not yet know that the Museum exists just as much as the communities that do. The message resounds now more than ever—museums must be clear in how they define, engage, and serve their communities. And in continuing to support artists and their ideas to the best of our ability, we too must come to embody an active citizen, a neighbor and collaborator willing to work with, for and through our community.

In 1961, icon of Modern Liberalism Robert F. Kennedy predicted a black man could become President of the United States. At the time, these words slapped up against the status quo and challenged inherited ideas that white privilege would forever prevail in oppressing equal rights to representation. Beyond the complex ways America’s visions for an equitable society have evolved and devolved since, no one could predict just how powerful a Black presidency would actually be—let alone the magnitude of the aftershocks it would provoke in its wake.

This month, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery unveiled two commissioned portraits of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama by artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. This ceremony, like most involving the Obamas, marked a celebration of historical firsts—in addition to Mr. Obama being the first African American represented in the presidential portrait collection, Sherald and Wiley are the first African American artists commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to render these prestigious portraits. While much can be said about how the Obama era laid the groundwork for this art historical moment, these portraits tell us as much about the leaders depicted, as they do about the American public to whom they were unveiled. Michelle Obama herself recognized the Faustian gift she and Barack had placed in the hands of these two artists. As Sherald recounted, “Michelle was like, ‘I’m really sorry. We’re giving you an opportunity, and handing you to the wolves at the same time.” 1

Both Sherald and Wiley use color as a political and perceptual device to implode the tradition of presidential portraits as monosyllabic representations of power, persona, and poise. In its place, a new paradigm emerges in which contemporary art animates history by depicting its makers in their full magnetism, and contemporary artists assert themselves as empowered co-authors of history. Let’s recall the very mission upon which the National Portrait Gallery was established, only one year after Kennedy’s famous words: “to tell the American story through the individuals who have shaped it.” It is with this founding principle in mind that one can most fully grasp the gravity of this new chapter—not only are African Americans claiming and articulating our rightful place in the story of this country, but we too are inventing the visual language through which the story of American progress is written.

Kehinde Wiley has made a prolific career of subverting what he terms the “signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and the sublime.” Centering African-American subjects from all walks of life—in postures of power and within vibrant, culturally adorned canvases—Wiley uproots popular understandings of subjectivity and objectivity within traditions of portraiture. In this markedly metaphysical work, Wiley situates Obama on a chair enveloped by his ancestral flora, with fronds that both illuminate and obscure his figure. In this interplay between background and foreground, Wiley simultaneously anchors Obama to his Kenyan, Hawaiian and Chicagoan roots, and frees him of the numerous labels and stereotypes placed upon him, an act of equal parts affirmation and liberation. Multiple aspects of Obama’s identity merge in harmony—the fearless, the soft, the quirky, and the stern—dismantling the trope that presidential portraits need to reify hyper-masculinity and dilute the many other facets of identity. Most potent for me is the fact that, in isolation, Barack Obama’s portrait is just as gripping a representation of an individual as it is a remarkably stark contrast to many of the presidential portraits that precede it­.

Amy Sherald puts forth her own distinct approach to portraiture that sheds photorealism and laws of similitude to cast her subjects in a bold new light—one that, in fact, emanates from within. She foregrounds the inner dynamism of her subjects by rendering them at a larger-than-life scale, armed with props that help to tell their story. In the case of Michelle Obama, the prop is the eclectic Milly gown, which, for the artist, is a narrative cue equally important as the expression on Obama’s face. Like all of Sherald’s works, this portrait demands time be spent with it, as details progressively emerge that beg further investigation—the grayscale of Obama’s skin, the patina of her eyes, the purple of her nails, and the many messages folded within the expanse of her dress. With time and thanks to the meditative space forged by the monochromatic, ethereal background, conceptual layers emerge atop the more tactile ones, such as the subtlety of Obama’s strength, and her comfort within her skin. Sherald elects to project an infinite vision of Obama that has yet to take shape in the public’s perception, a controversial choice that has confounded those expecting a “likeness” to popular media portrayals already in circulation. In my conversation with Sherald, she describes her decision to forgo a smiling portrait;

It’s really interesting to me that we still can't see ourselves without seeing race—we have a limited imagination of how we can express ourselves, and who we are. I feel as though [some people] really wanted a glamour shot of Michelle. And—even though she is beautiful and fancy—that's just not who she is! I don't see her as a frivolous personality. From our conversations, I knew that I wanted her to look relaxed, as if we caught her gaze in a contemplative moment. I wanted her grace to shine through, and the great sense of power and energy about her that you can literally feel.”

And it's true—as one of the most photographed women in history—the cameras have only managed to capture the most visible and lovable sides of Obama. However, this portrait evokes more than what meets the eye alone, and is delivered by Sherald with the same compassionate intellect that Obama herself is known for.

These phenomenal portraits of Michelle and Barack strive for, and achieve, a great deal: they insert intersectionality into the practice of institutionalized portrait painting; they uphold the qualities of a masterful work of art by capturing the essence and aura of these remarkable individuals; they revive American cultural traditions to be more reflective and inclusive of all America; and they irrevocably embed “color” within the White House and the white cube. Yet, propelled by this moment in history, they also move beyond the creative act of rendering visible the invisible on an individual level. They speak to a collective dream held by people of color to see ourselves—in all our complexity, power, and particularity—reflected in our institutions. And the pride, emotion, confusion, shock, conversation, fear and hope they evoke in their viewers is nothing short of a slap to the canon of the art historical portrait itself.

Notes

Conversation with the artist, Thursday, February 22nd, 2018. She also said, “I’m not really sure what I was expecting I was just surprised at the vitriol…And everyone who likes the painting feels like they need to let me know where they stand politically before they pay me the compliment—they can't just say, ‘I really like that painting.’”

As The Studio Museum in Harlem enters the second year of inHarlem—a series of collaborative programs and public art initiatives exploring innovative ways to work in the neighborhood—I’m honored to convene five pioneering women of color that represent leadership at community partner organizations: Tina Campt, Pat Cruz, Erika Dilday and Sade Lythcott, alongside our own Thelma Golden. In our current political moment, the key philosophies, principles and pedagogies that shape our work have acquired a new sense of urgency, prompting us to explore the potential of socially engaged art to protect freedoms of expression and reinforce community. In a candid look at our collective commitment to amplifying the voices, practices and traditions that transform physical space into cultural place, we discuss how arts- and artist-driven experiences within our walls transform social relations that evolve and are sustained outside of them.

Nico Wheadon: Across our distinct institutional missions, we share a commitment to community and engaging the complex intersections of art and society. Often, when qualifying the impact and importance of an institution’s engagement with its community, somehow the nuanced, intersectional and catalytic role of the artist can become obscured. Let's begin by affirming the role artists play within our organizations.

Pat Cruz: Our practice and reputation at Harlem Stage is in identifying artists who are making visionary statements about who we are as a society and culture. and, more importantly, who they are so that we can see the world through their lenses. Our practice is primarily curatorial; we identify artists, geniuses from within our community, whose visions match with our mission, and then work to expand that vision. So the activism and art that emerges are essentially one and the same.

Thelma Golden: The Studio Museum was founded by artists and is still deeply committed to bringing artists together with the Harlem community and beyond. Artists have truly been at the heart of the Museum since we opened in 1968, and the “Studio” in our name reflects our unwavering commitment to their ongoing professional development. More than a decade into my tenure as director, I am proud to lead an institution that has meant so much to so many artists of African descent.

Erika Dilday: At Maysles Cinema, we define what we do as the nexus of social justice and art. When you work so closely with the community, it is often difficult to identify where you draw the line around the artist. What constitutes an artist, and how do we define that in relation to our audiences while validating artists with a broad spectrum of ability? How do we open the door for more broad types of raw, artistic expression from the community? These are questions we struggle with.

Sade Lythcott: The National Black Theatre is a training ground and laboratory for artists and arts administrators to develop themselves holistically—every administrator here identifies as an artist first. It has extreme bonuses and often long learning curves, but ultimately provides a sensitivity to the needs of the practice from the inside out. It is also a radical activism that allows artists to lead from an entrepreneurial space. Because we were founded in reaction to a patrilineal, misogynistic pedagogy around Western theater, everything we birth comes from a space of indigenous, divine, womanist, ritualistic practice led by artists.

NW: What a powerful idea—that artists expand the institutional consciousness of the world, and invite institutions and audiences alike to define notions of self, community and creativity more robustly. As social innovators, engaged citizens and critical thinkers that uniquely mediate a broad spectrum of concerns, artists exponentially advance institutional community engagement through the risks that they take—and that we support. How then do these bold curatorial and artistic insertions—into both the art historical canon and the community—ensure and protect the visibility of artists of color?

TG: In my experience, arts and culture organizations are deeply committed to engaging with the public, and offer educational opportunities at every level. That’s a basic responsibility that we all take very seriously. Most museums also exhibit work that comments on current social and political issues, from the perspective of the artists themselves and their desire to speak out. If a museum is truly committed to artists, their careers and contemporaneity, then it is the role of the curator to recognize the artist’s voice and respond to it appropriately.

Tina Campt: What I’ve learned from working with your institutions through Barnard’s Harlem Semester is the power of curation as a pedagogical, activist and scholarly undertaking. The erasure of artists happens only if we don't acknowledge their critical, activist power. Engaging artists who take risks, perform risk—that’s what connects us, allows us to look differently at how we deal with everyday life. I also have to emphasize that the matrilineage of our organizations in Harlem is not accidental; it really does shape the nature of the organizations themselves!

NW: So then is it our duty as women, as leaders within established cultural institutions, to expand the field and resources available to artists working through social practice, or do these artists transcend the need for institutional mediation? In other words, what can our institutions offer to their processes that isn’t already inherent, and could our role simply be to identify pioneering artists and democratize access to their work?

SL: My mom—the founder of the theater—used to welcome people to their “home away from home,” which has become the bedrock on which we have built this institution. We have always aimed to create a space where people can feel fully seen in their most vulnerable times. This home away from home invites artists to use the space, a healing space, and allows people to drop their guards and see each other in a different way, where there is no division between art and community.

PC: Art and community becoming one is different for each of us. One thing we have not paid attention to is that there has been an unspoken censorship, a racist and economic practice excluding the voices of artists of color from being held in prominent positions to get the support and investment it takes to sustain a practice. Our institutions have pushed back against “excellence” as criterion for a racist selection processes, and ensured that art by artists of color is seen and lifted up as art.

TG: The role of the Museum is to actively listen to our artists, communities and visitors in developing our offerings—and at the center of that is community engagement. A museum without a community, without people meaningfully engaging with artists and their work, does not fulfill its mission and purpose. Our ongoing project, Harlem Postcards, is a great example of how we democratize access to the arts—the series lets people see Harlem through the eyes of artists and take a work of art home with them in the form of a postcard, which they then make their own.

TC: The other thing that you as arts institutions do is give artists a platform, a singular arena or avenue of critique. Even when presenting work that some audiences might not be able to understand—such as social critiques by artists of color—you allow artists to bring work into the world as a mirror reflecting something some don't want to see. That is the real activism, rejecting the lens of the dominant perspective and embracing those of artists of color.

ED: As an artist at Maysles, you become a member of an artist community, have a voice in what we do, and are encouraged to articulate how we can best support you. We try to treat our relationship with artists as a lifelong membership: We can be your fiscal sponsor, show your work and qualify your film. We turn filmmakers into curators who don't just seek to show their work, but also seek to be part of discussing and programming it.

NW: So if our primary duties are to provide access to transformative art experiences, engage the community in thinking creatively and usher in new ways of working, how does social practice’s emphasis on process and participation expand our definitions of collaboration? I’m hoping we can speak to what collaboration between an institution and its community looks like, and where the accountability lies.

SL: The National Black Theatre serves as radical space for giving people permission to see themselves as worthy, as capable, as art. This is something that, in most spaces, is not reflected back to us. To be seen, sometimes for the first time in full complexity and intersectionality, gives the community permission to take those same risks within themselves. How do audiences then become transformed, walk out of the door, live differently and take risk back to the community? These are important questions.

TC: I have seen students learn not just from artists, but from your institutions, about what it means to create the infrastructure in which those individuals can thrive, and where institutions care about them thriving. As teachers we want them to understand what it means to sustain a practice on an institutional level, and that it’s about investment in a community and a risky art practice.

PC: I would add to that incredibly important point, Tina. Some of us are thriving, but only barely when we look at the kind of support needed to do this work. We are still so far under-resourced, in staff and the funding required to do the work. Additionally, institutions of color also have expectations imposed upon us that predefine what community building is, and we frequently are in a responsive position rather than a proactive one in defining those ideas for ourselves. These are obstacles that we must overcome, and often do through collaboration.

Maker’s Mixtape celebrates artists whose practices animate processes foundational to the mixtape format— compilation, splicing, collage, looping and overlay. By remixing diverse source materials and juxtaposing voices to establish complex narratives, both recording and visual artists have transformed popular understandings of what it means to be a maker in the twenty-first century.

Over hip-hop’s decades-long history, visual artists such as Derrick Adams have been inspired to use collage as a political device, by infusing images of the black figure with detailed nuance, color and particularity. In his works on paper, Adams focuses on “the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface, exploring self-image and forward projection.”

The reinsertion of ardently queered, popular images back into mainstream discourse is a practice that applies to both art and music. Through inviting visual artists to share the songs that motivate them to create, Maker’s Mixtapes draws meaningful connections between inspiration and process. Here is what Derrick Adams can be caught rocking out to in his Bed-Stuy studio:

In a multifarious practice that spans the realms of performance, 2D and 3D work, Derrick Adams is a master interpreter of both popular and unpopular culture. His layered mash-ups of quotidian objects and texts reconfigure conventional understandings of form and structure in contemporary art practices. Through complex processes of fragmentation and re-construction, Adams’ works weave together temporal and visual elements that complicate the histories we’ve been fed as essential truths. A colleague, friend and mentor, Derrick has been my art-boo and confidant since I stepped out on the scene nearly a decade ago. In a ten-year reunion of sorts, we sat down over steaks to discuss a few offal truths about the art world, and our lived experience in it as black folk.

N: Can you talk a bit about the genesis of your photo series, “Communicating with Shadows”? What led you open up that dialogue with the legacies of artists such as David Hammons, Bruce Nauman and Adrian Piper?

D: The motivation behind this series was more about my conceptual relationship with these particular artists as their beneficiary—how I view my creative practice as it relates to what these artists make, and how they make it. My performance takes place within the shadow of what they have left for me to experience, understand, and respond to.

N: When I think of what a shadow is, or the conditions that allow it to be present, I imagine a bright source of light. Can you discuss this dichotomy between light and dark, what is seen and what is obscured, and how that spectrum resonates in your work?

D: In “Communicating with Shadows,” I used the silhouetted image projected on the wall as a backdrop for the performance as a major element of the work. I used a traditional overhead projector—the instrument used for presentations—which enabled smaller imagery to appear larger-than-life, through illumination of light and magnification. I like using basic objects that have practical function, as they can also highlight duplicity in meaning. The light and dark of the shadows were in conversation, with a transformed scale from small to large.

N: In a world divided by binaries, it is interesting to consider what inhabits the shadows or grey areas—the vast, conceptual distances between such constructs as self and other, or black and white. And often, it seems like the richness of the spectrum gets diluted in mainstream discourse. You know, like, how there are black artists that make black art, and then there are black artists that resist representations of black subjectivity to redirect people’s attention to their unique approach to form or process. Can you riff on that a bit, and talk about the ways you constantly resituate yourself and your body in your work?

D: Well, I believe most creatives resist the title of “black art” mainly because we may feel it is a contained space to exist in—a space given to us instead of chosen. The fact is our basic reality is one that has been constructed for us. I personally think it’s totally fine to own making “black art” just like people who make “black music,” it’s still music and you’re gonna dance to it when it’s played! Some believe that because it’s black music it has a significance not usually found in other types of music. So it’s more about understanding value systems in a way that will empower us to elevate the term. I’m Black, Black American, Afro-American, African American, American, etc, all rolled into one—I own it. Because I’m all of these and really much more, it’s all in the work as a result of my cultural perspective, which is my life experience. Black Cultureis American culture, and its complicated. Trust that if your artwork ever goes to auction or to a museum collection, your race will be part of the sales pitch, regardless of what you’re making.

N: And what about this fetish and desire of blackness? Unwanted or undesirable in certain mainstream definitions of beauty or high art, and totally desirable when it comes to comedy and entertainment—read also: Blackish. Lol.

D: When I look at certain TV programs I can tell which shows with black characters and storylines are created for me, as an audience member, in mind. I can also tell when there are programs about black culture with all black casts made for non-black people in the hopes ofgiving particular audiences a hyper-representation of black life to illustrate how some people think we perform for each other. Some blacks even love it. This is usually so off in their depiction that it’s painful to watch.

N: What narratives do you think are omitted in depictions of the black experience? I know we talked the other day about the mystique of the successful, black artist. That there can be an omission of truth when it comes to the business of being an artist, and sustaining that life. What is the state of advocacy and mentorship in the art world?

D: Artists are like institutions and like everyone else we are part of a system. There has always been an interest in seeing the “black struggle” as a source of overcoming and perseverance, even in the art world. The story of black hardship as a provocation to sell and entice—“poverty porn,” as some call it—is usually associated with works that confront how we may be viewed, versus those who may live from earnings they make in the commercial art world. I want to leave for young people a body of work expressing more of the successful yet layered parts of black culture, not just what has been done to us, but more so of how we as a people have transformed this planet through our contributions before, during and after slavery and colonization. I want to put forth the other “real” black experience: blackness normalized, because it exists and I want future generations to be able to reference it.

N: And what about success more broadly? When I think about art-world outsiders, I think about those who are not self-taught, but rather use what they’ve learned directly from their environment, lived-experience and materials to make some seriously radical work, that in turn impacts and opens up the mainstream in important ways!

D: The thing I love about the art world now more than previous years is the severe splintering of creative practice and output with purpose. I think we have almost every area covered these days, the inside and outside of the mainstream art world. I love exhibiting in commercial and noncommercial spaces equally. Some ideas are better presented in alternative spaces that lend itself to the purpose of the work and the audience receiving the message. For me artmaking is therapy—sometimes it happens in front of an audience and other times in isolation. The results of both are used as a learning tool to understand who I am and how I occupy this space as a thinker, maker and responder to my environment.

N: We also talked about art as an outlet for the trauma of blackness. Do you think artists of color create altogether new visual languages to communicate a life experience too traumatic, too beautiful or too complex for words alone? And what remains undepictable, or unpalatable?

D: Being able to make great art requires a higher level of competence and a keen ability to communicate ideas into objects. There’s something special about the nature of things made by hand and the many ways it can be interpreted, that it doesn’t have to come with instructions to appreciate meaning. The language of visual arts and its understanding is subjective and the viewer’s understanding of it exposes their level critical thinking. People are always ready for the extremes, they expect it.

I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary feat that draws much of its complexity from corralling the all-too-obscure history of race in the United States. A brilliant translator of this narrative, Haitian filmmaker and activist Raoul Peck adapts the unfinished, final novel by James Baldwin—provisionally titled Remember This House—as a framing device to unpack broader issues of power and privilege. Peck—to whom the few pages of the original manuscript were entrusted by the writer's estate—expertly matches Baldwin's prophetic lyricism with his own highly innovative approach. He juxtaposes images of today's political movements with Baldwin's manifestos and archival clips from the civil rights era, employing film's ability to collapse time and space to challenge the truth of American progress.

Riffing wholly off the tone and tenor of the manuscript, I Am Not Your Negrointimately recalls the fates of three assassinated civil rights leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. For Baldwin, this novel was to be immensely personal, as he set out to expound his own life through revering his fallen friends, all essential allies during the '50s and '60s. The film buoys this intimacy throughout, harnessing the powerful voice of Baldwin at every turn. Furthermore, it employs the book's biographical framework to underscore activism's role in exposing the porous nature of the Constitution upon which this country has been so precariously built.

Diverging from the documentary convention of fragmented interviews with talking, tokenized heads, I Am Not Your Negro breaks all sorts of other codes, deconstructing traditional barriers between expert and novice, bourgeoisie and proletariat, performer and audience. Recalling Baldwin's plea that we allbear witness to the harsh realities of our times, clips that demand eye contact with historic oppressors are brought to the foreground. We are presented with scenes of brutality in their entirety to avoid sensationalizing or normalizing racial violence. Here, film editing is a tool to promote viewer engagement; it enables an audience to position itself in relation to the ailing democracy that Evers, X, and King gave their lives to defend.

Despite the film's reliance on borrowed words and remixed source materials, Peck puts forth a dynamic assemblage that makes use of the cinema poetics that have become his trademark. At times hard to watch—yet impossible to overlook—images from the civil rights movement are presented in color, rather than the black and white of history books, complicating the nostalgia they evoke. And he goes a step further by inserting them into our contemporary media dialogue. Baldwin's futurist passages teleport us to current social injustices, underscoring the timelessness and growing importance of his reflections. Indeed, what's most stirring is that—despite the almost half-century separating Baldwin's lectures from the police shootings in Ferguson, Charlotte, and Orlando (to name only a few)—his words ring loud and clear against the lived experience of many African-Americans today.

Toward the beginning of the film Baldwin asserts, "The story of the Negro in America is the story of America." And toward the end he declares, "History is not the past, it is our present." It strikes me that what Baldwin really confronts—and what this film so gracefully epitomizes—is the vacuum of accountability that permeates how this country remembers the past and inhabits its wake. While neither Baldwin nor the film go so far as to offer solutions to the vast rifts that fundamentally divide our country, both nod to the role each and every one of us can play in foregrounding the essential truth that all men are created equal. Both give us a document, a verifiable record of note, that implodes the fallacy that "Give me liberty, or give me death!" is a freedom afforded all Americans.

This spring, The Studio Museum in Harlem was proud to partner with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) for the Harlem Semester, a bold public humanities initiative fostering dynamic exchange between Barnard and Columbia students, and the local community. Siting faculty instruction within some of Harlem’s most celebrated cultural organizations, the coursework deeply engaged the host institutions, and provided students with site-specific curricula and access to key staff, archives and resources. Tracing the genesis of the venture, Tina Campt—BCRW Director, Chair of Africana Studies and faculty coordinator of the Harlem Semester—recalls, “We are proximate to Harlem, and Harlem is one of the cultural capitals of the African diaspora. What would happen if we were to actually offer a coherent cluster of courses that was not teaching about Harlem, but was instead teaching Harlem through the institutions and the people who have made it such an amazing place?”

To unpack the radical potential of this ideology to shift how Harlem is explored through contemporary art practices, Leslie Hewitt—artist, Barnard faculty member and 2007–08 alumna of the Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program—designed a course entitled “Freestyle and Displacement in Contemporary Art Practices.” The visual arts seminar mines the wealth of critical thought, writing and practice emanating from the Museum’s seminal 2001 exhibition Freestyle, which featured the work of twenty-eight then-emerging artists, including Sanford Biggers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kira Lynn Harris, Jennie C. Jones, Dave McKenzie and Julie Mehretu, to name a few. In the course syllabus, Hewitt explains, “Freestyle helped usher a generation of artists into public discourse and scrutiny, highlighting a cacophony of influences, histories, and art tendencies. The wide array of artworks and approaches to art making that it put on display challenged the art world and questioned conventional thinking about art made by artists of color in the twenty-first century.”

For many in the field, and particularly young artists of color seeking to enter it, Freestyle marked the birth of an expanded canon that confronts the many barriers between contemporary black art and mainstream discourse. Aside from the physical space the exhibition claimed, it also forged a new conceptual space for “post-black” thought and practice, in which emerging artists were able to build complex identities, independent from the dominant, categorical language of the time, which subsumed them within the shadows of established artists of color. “This exhibition is neither a definitive survey nor a comprehensive exhibition, in the scope of its subject, but rather an attempt to look at this exciting moment with eyes wide open for what’s to come,” Thelma Golden writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. “Freestyle is part of the long-term strategy at The Studio Museum in Harlem to seek out, support, and present the work of emerging artists in the African Diaspora and beyond. Freestyle allows this generation of artists to add their voices to the prevailing dialogue and debates while expanding the platform of contemporary art.”

Drawing from the continuum of artistic license ignited by this exhibition, and building upon Barnard’s prompt to engage the Museum’s history in scholarship surrounding Harlem’s cultural legacy, the Museum invited Hewitt’s students to participate in a month-long residency, alongside Artist-in-Residence program alumni and Museum staff. During the month of April, four seminars were sited at the Museum, and featured lectures by Thelma Golden, Irene V. Small, Courtney J. Martin and Rashida Bumbray. The seminars covered a vast array of topics that surfaced in Freestyle, including temporality, simultaneity, subjectivity, displacement, forced migration, diaspora and community. “Studio Lab: Freestyle and Displacement in Contemporary Art Practices” served as a testing ground for interdisciplinary practice, in which participants explored the impact of these issues on the complex ways contemporary art is produced, exhibited and discussed.

Marc Andre Robinson—artist, 2004–05 artist in residence and Studio Lab participant—reflected on the cosmic shift Freestyle set into motion recalling, “I saw Freestyle when I was in graduate school at MICA [Maryland Institute College of Art] and it had a huge impact on me. Seeing that exhibition put some momentum behind my general desire to move to New York after graduation, and gave me something real to focus on outside of a vague notion of what it meant to enter the art world. With Freestyle came the sense of breaking down barriers, of movement, and the freedom to pull from as many different influences as I liked. I feel like Studio Lab resonates with an experience like that and, by design, creates new possibility—a space rich with conversation and dialogue, much like Freestyle did.” In addition to Robinson, six alumni of the Artist-in-Residence program participated in Studio Lab with their distinct voices, as they reflected on their own formative Museum moments. Representing a seventeen-year span of the Artist-in-Residence program, Elia Alba (1998–99), Sanford Biggers (1999–2000), Saya Woolfalk (2007–08), Valerie Piraino (2009–10), Lauren Kelley (2009–10), Sadie Barnette (20014–15), EJ Hill (2015–16) and Jordan Casteel (2015–16) narrated the collective history of the Museum through their deeply personal experiences with it.

It was the profound candor of the Studio Lab platform that resonated most with Yadira Capaz, a junior at Barnard majoring in urban studies with an interest in how the arts make cities thrive. “Having this deeper engagement with administrators and the community of resident artists made me realize how vitally impactful the Museum’s legacy is. As an artist sharing this heritage, the conversations and histories I heard made me feel supported in a space where I didn’t have to justify my existence, and my context was understood,” Capaz says. Most participants reflecting on this experience similarly articulated a profound respect for the Harlem Semester’s goal to build sustainable community through engaged scholarship and increased access.

From a museological perspective, this elastic model for multidirectional and intergenerational learning explodes the tradition of how art history is taught, and demands the field reexamine the role of the artist and the responsibility of institutions in relation to our own canonization. While Studio Lab inspired contemporary readings of historic events and texts, it also pioneered an altogether new language through which the Museum could reimagine its work, impact and mission. Activating a matrix of Museum stakeholders, the initiative dared us to take stock and rearticulate a shared set of values for all those making, learning and dreaming uptown. As the Museum approaches its fiftieth anniversary in Harlem, it is my sincere hope that this type of “dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society” will continue to define the future of our work, and that collaborations such as the Harlem Semester will enable us to more fluidly respond to our neighborhood, neighbors and needs.

The Studio Museum in Harlem and WNYC are thrilled to announce the second annual collaboration between the station’s performance venue—The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space—and the Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. Exploring the dynamic intersection of the visual arts and public radio, this partnership amplifies the distinct voices of our resident artists, connects them to alumni of the program and broadcasts discussions of their work to a broader public. WNYC 93.9 FM and 820 AM are New York’s flagship public radio stations, and deliver a diverse suite of award-winning local and international programming to audiences worldwide.

Eaah year, this partnership kicks off with an artist talk at The Greene Space featuring the current artists in residence in conversation with the alumni of the program who have inspired them most. Moderated by a host from WNYC radio, the live conversation unearths shared connections to Harlem as a site of inspiration and experimentation, and provides unique insight into the Museum’s nearly fifty-year history through the personal accounts of those who comprise its lifeblood. For the inaugural radio program last year, 2014–15 artists in residence Sadie Barnette, Lauren Halsey and Eric Mack were joined by alumni Xenobia Bailey (1998–99), Sanford Biggers (1999–2000) and Leslie Hewitt (2007–08) to discuss the role of the residency, the Museum and the city in their evolution as artists.

This summer, 2015–16 artists in residence Jordan Casteel, EJ Hill and Jibade-Khalil Huffman will celebrate the launch of their Museum exhibition Tenses by concurrently activating The Greene Space through a satellite installation and related public programming. Held on July 26, the program will feature the artists in conversation with program alumni Kevin Beasley, Kerry James Marshall and Dave McKenzie. It will also debut new day-in-the-life videos, shot on location in the Museum studios. Produced by WNYC, the videos further illustrate the creativity and passion driving each artists’ work, and provide a very crucial space for them to discuss their practices in their own voices. “I’m most excited about being able to interface with an entirely different audience and mode of communication,” says EJ Hill of the initiative. “I’ve grown used to having conversations in and around the visual art context so I’m eager to see what types of happy accidents or challenges arise when working through channels that don’t necessarily rely on the visual.”

Through this yearly collaboration, the Museum deepens its commitment to supporting emerging artists and diversifying the platforms through which the public is invited to engage with their work and process. Moreover, the collaboration invites the public to gain greater insight into the seminal program that, in part, gives the Studio Museum its name. Jordan Casteel sums up the excitement around what is to come when she says, “I see the collaboration with WNYC as a wonderful opportunity to share our experiences as artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem with a broader New York audience. We are taken out of our studio ‘nests’ and given space and resources to continue to push our practices into a new arena. I am looking forward to seeing how our stories expand, change and/or grow through new conversations and relationships.” Stay tuned for more details at studiomuseum.org as this year’s programming continues to evolve.

For over half a century, Mary Corse—an American artist, primarily working through the medium of painting—has confronted the aura and specificity of materials, experimenting with their capacity to respond to the surrounding environment. From her iconic use of prismatic, glass microspheres, to her ongoing explorations of organic materials, Corse roots her practice in the belief that the essence of painting is not specific to paint itself.

Corse emerged in the 1960s alongside the West coast, minimalist aesthetic known as Light and Sound. While she resists singular classification within this movement, she clearly relishes in the conceptual space its minimalism affords. Through a bold erasure of excess, Corse draws attention to both the psychology and corporeality of perception. It is her keen attention to the minutiae—right down to her use of beveled canvases that minimize her work’s protrusion from the wall—that makes the dimensionality of her paintings even more robust.

I was fortunate to catch up with Corse to discuss the role of the artist within the secular world, and consider three questions essential to her practice: What is seen? What is unseen? and What is real?

NICO: There is a bodily aspect to your work that seems to reward—maybe even necessitate—an active viewer. Light refracts, hues emerge and patinas shift as one moves across the surface of your paintings. I know you have described perception as the true art form at play in your work, so how much is your role as an artist tied to intuiting certain spatial relations to your work?

MARY: Oh sure, I think about the architecture, the proportions of the space, and the relation of the paintings to each other, knowing that the viewer will ultimately come in and be involved. But it is not a controlled situation that I envision in exactly one way; instead, it encompasses whatever happens in that moment. I get more concerned about the dialogue between the works, which is a conversation that of course the viewer becomes a part of. They walk around the painting or they don’t, that’s their choice. But my hope is that they can become part of the painting.

N: Can you explain how the materials themselves invite viewers to become part of the work?

M: People often think my paintings are made from microbeads that reflect light in a 1-2 relationship, but that’s a misconception. I actually use glass microspheres, or prisms that forge a triangular relationship between the painting’s surface, the light and the viewer. And at the middle of this is the viewer’s perception, which animates the work as they move and shift; so in that way, the art is really not on the wall at all, it’s in their perception.

N: Working with reflective and refractive materials, are you able to you see yourself in your work as you create it? How does the process of making the work differ from that of viewing it on the wall?

M: Before I even start the painting, I see it as a vision. I see it in my mind, similar to how we see images in our dreams. But when I’m working on the painting, it’s a totally different experience from when I step back and see it in its entirety. It’s a different kind of connection; I can’t wait to see it, but I’m so caught up in the process that I don’t actually see it at all. And it could drive you crazy, all the layers, all the sanding, and you don’t even know what you have until dusting off the final layer. And if there is one brushstroke that I don’t like, it can ruin the whole painting. But I don’t see it in this final state until its done and I am in the same position as the viewer.

N: Have you ever had an unveiling moment where the final piece was so far from your vision for it that you were unable to work with it anymore?

M: Absolutely. When that happens, there is no working with it. Its over and there is no fixing it or going back. That’s just it, because it is all happening in the moment. The painting is on the floor, I am over it painting and pouring beads, and my assistant is pulling me back and forth on this long board with wheels, and we just keep going and going. Some people can work on a painting for years, forever, which would drive me crazy! So in a way it’s OK that it’s over when it’s over, regardless of the outcome. I either made it, or I didn’t.

N: I understand that feeling well. I think it is similar to any process where you throw yourself in completely, both physically and emotionally. There must be an end or else the process can end you. What are the physical challenges to painting intuitively, and have you ever had an idea for a work that you were unable to visualize?

M: After ten years of making white paintings in the sixties and seventies, I found myself in the mountains molding these black, earth tiles. Before that, I hadn’t made a painting smaller than eight feet. I had to design and build this kiln, in which I managed to make a four square foot tile. At the time, that was the world’s largest tile, and all the kiln builders had said it would never work. While I haven’t realized that project yet at the scale I intend to, at least I kept at it until I found the way to do it. It was a real earth slab factory I had going on out there in Topanga Canyon, right off a quiet dirt road up in the mountains.

This was in the seventies so I really had no funding; I mean, all I needed was an extra ten thousand dollars, you know, and I could have done it right then and there! Richard Bellamy was supportive to a certain extent, but those kinds of experiments cost a lot of money. I made a lot of experimental progress, but before I could get the rest of the funds together for that, I had moved on to making these black on black glitter paintings. The slabs took me in that direction. But I still plan to make that earth tile piece one day.

N: You mentioned working with an assistant at times when you are building larger armatures to support your work. But, outside of that, is your process pretty solitary?

M: Its solitary for sure, that’s the part I like. At certain stages of the painting, I need to work with others, although artists are totally sensitive to the psyche of others, and that can affect the work. But at other stages, you have to be alone, because that’s when you start having a conversation with the bigger picture, and transcend thought to enter into a different context. For me, the solitary act of painting reminds me to consider and keep track of the questions, Who am I? and Where am I? Those questions keep me going.

N: When I consider these heavy questions, and your commitment to carrying them through each step of your process, it becomes clear how deeply philosophical and metaphysical your work is. It makes me wonder if your work might not also be considered political, at least in its pursuit of truth.

M: There is no political intention in my work. My interest is in getting out of the finite, thinking, particular realm which politics is certainly imbedded in. To me, even a point in time exists within the finite world. When I’m painting, I want to have a conversation with the infinite, with the multiverse. Right now, I assume we are both in a building, and that we have roofs over our heads. But actually, what’s really touching the top of our heads is outer space. We forget that this is where we are, and I’d rather be curious about that than any particulars. The political is so small compared to Who am I? What am I? and What is happening? I want to know what’s happening on the unseen levels. When I’m painting, I can have that conversation and the paintings give me those answers. And if people like the painting, then they are getting some kind of answer too.

N: And how does context help you to answer these questions? How do you see yourself in relation to art history, contemporary practice, and what you perceive to be the future of the field?

M: There is definitely an evolution of painting, and I function within this artistic context. I was first really influenced by early, New York abstraction. At age fifteen, I was tracing works by de Kooning and Hofmann. And I think there are a few lineages: the conceptual lineage coming from Duchamp, and the painting lineage coming from Cézanne and Manet. I’m very interested in the evolution of ideas, perception and consciousness in art, as they relate to everything else. And this is where physics comes in.

N: In a past interview, you stated, “part of me thinks that physics and art are two sides of the brain, they sort of parallel one another in their discoveries.” Can you unpack this a bit more?

M: You know what I say? I think it’d be great if humans could use both sides of our brain, equally. Art and physics share the goal of trying to describe and make seen the unseen; physics uses a formula, and the artist uses proportion and shape. Physics, or what is now metaphysics, says that reality is perceptual. And that’s why art now has to be saying the same thing. I have really been playing with the inner band in my paintings, which is an inner dimension that appears and disappears as you move around it. I learn from each one of my paintings, and when I step back, I can see that whatever it is that the artists and the physicists are talking about is real.

N: What about synaesthesia, or the union of the senses? I’ve read that you are able to see energy in this inner band, especially between the white and black in your monochromatic works. Are there any other sensory impressions you experience or seek to insert into your work?

M: For years, the center band in my paintings was white, and then I transitioned to placing black at the center. The optical energy between the white and black is so flashy that it creates a white energy field across that black. And I realized this was the whole point, seeing the unseen. Energy is fascinating and the most elusive of all; we only see what it’s done, the direction it is going, or the trail it has left behind. But do we really see energy? The desire to understand and see energy is similar to the desire to understand and feel love.

From childhood, we are told what the limits are, what we can see, touch or hear. Imagine if we weren’t told from the time we were born what is possible and what is impossible? I am interested in the experience before the concept, before we conceptualize it. And who knows what we actually see in that moment, because we are so trained and conditioned. One of the things about painting is that it sheds this conditioning, sheds the surrounding culture, and returns you to your original being.

N: Do you think art evolves in the same ways that science does? The way I see it, science is always making visible progress, drawing attention to some previously unseen aspect of the finite pool of matter that’s existed on earth forever. But a critique I often hear of contemporary art is that there are no new ideas, and that everything has been done before. That, somehow, the pool of conceptual matter actually becomes bankrupt over time. How do you respond to that?

M: I don’t know, but I think it’s amazingly interesting! Do you know that, right now, scientists are sending photos from Pluto? I wish the whole world would catch up with the potential of human consciousness. But we are still here, on primitive planet Earth. I’m big on freedom and experiencing who you really are in the moment, and not being so created by culture that your creative self isn’t really there. To really be creative, artists have to go beyond the thinking mind. That’s not where art comes from. I question how people can live their entire lives without exploring this freedom.

I am a realist looking for something that’s true. I want to have a true moment; I don’t want to live in a fantasy about the future, or be nostalgic over the past. I want to be right here, now, where there is no time. I’m big on that, living your life in the moment. That’s why I resist technology. People aspire to be like machines, and we are getting to be more and more mechanical. I worry that someone has to keep this true art connection happening, or else we will all become a bunch of robots.

N: And what excites you now, Mary? How do you plan to keep this true art connection alive?

M: I want to continue to bring paintings outdoors. My interest in outdoor pieces is ongoing. I want to do more paintings on the sides of huge buildings, and do a freestanding piece in the desert. I’ve had these ideas for twenty years, and am happy to finally be getting around to it.

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Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) received her B.F.A. from the University of California in 1963, and her M.F.A. from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1968. Corse’s work was recently exhibited in several historically significant exhibitions including Venice in Venice, a collateral exhibition curated by Nyehaus in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2011); Phenomenal: California Light and Space, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2011). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation Collection, Los Angeles; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Orange County Museum of Art at Newport Beach; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and other institutions public and private. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Equal parts addict, biographer, humanist and savant, Antoine d’Agata is a resilient artist who resists falling hostage to any one medium through an evolving practice that dilutes the distinction between living and making. His emotive body of work spans over a quarter-century and actively uproots firm classification within the art historical cannon. Rather, D’Agata’s striking photographs, films and publications eek out an altogether new ecosystem for self expression that is forever nourished by his rare curiosity, unhindered pursuit of adrenaline, and willingness to go where traditional documentarian methodologies dare not tread.

In D’Agata’s artist statement, he illuminates the categorical limits of photography and outlines the strong ethics that shape how he employs it. “Instead of reducing photography to the sole capacity of recording reality, I take responsibility for the position I assume. Rejecting voyeuristic or sociological standpoints, the images ensure art and action are inseparable in the frantic search for the feeling of being alive, of being part of life. In this fragile attempt, the image is defined both through and within the act that engenders it. It’s not my insight into the world that matters but my most intimate rapport with that world."

This world that he references and inhabits is most authentically characterized by the people that comprise it—sex workers, drug addicts and, in more general terms, those whose reality is directly and complexly tied to their own bodies. While D’Agata immerses himself within these subcultures, absorbing and incubating contagions without hesitation, his participation is a reasoned choice, bound on all sides by his lifelong commitment to adulterating the physical and cerebral divide. It is important to note that these are not anonymous encounters documented in his works, and are rather moments of solidarity and respect that aim to capture those rare and waning twinklings of humanity. D’Agata is most invested in this aspect of photography that necessitates his presence, and is very vocal about outlining his agency and responsibility in these situations of his own making.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Antoine upon his return from Cambodia where he was shooting Oscurana, a film on his relationship to methamphetamines and damaged territories that have survived the hardship of war and communism. I spoke with him about truth, death, and love, and asked him to unpack the role sex, drugs and art play in reaching utopia.

N: In your artist statement, you assert, “life overcomes art, and art perverts life.” Can you elaborate on what this means, both in your personal experience and for the field of contemporary art? How do sex, drugs and itinerancy help you to overcome art, and why does it need overcoming?

A: I always refused to play the game of art. I see the artist’s posture as fake, as hypocritical and cynical. My sanity has always been based on my capacity to go back to my very basic needs, habits, and addictions. Vice is redemption to me. It is some type of insurance to never give up, to never give in. I was a punk long before I “became” an artist and I’ll still be one long after nobody bothers looking at my images anymore. Art to me has never just been a way to give shape to a vision, a perspective on the world. It’s always been a method to push things further, to structure my struggle with things and beings, to embrace fear and time, to feel alive, to absorb life, to let life absorb me, enter me, to fade into life.

Right now, I am waiting for the meth to slowly evaporate from my blood, from my flesh, from my brain, and I struggle to keep some kind of sanity, of distance, of lucidity. But even this state of confusion, this banal nightmare is more precious than health, more rewarding than safety. Pain is a privilege; I use the excessive scenario I describe as an incentive to survive, to never give in to the temptation of comfort. To never feel numb again. The art world doesn’t mean anything to me, but I try to adopt the intransigence and dark beauty of that impossible position towards my own existence, and in all circumstances, that position, fatal but gorgeous, where all acts answer the necessity of merging fear with desire. Of using pain, ecstasy and violence as sensorial and existential means, of recognizing addiction and promiscuity as the most adequate social postures, of seeing, and evil as an antidote to the slow death of the consumer.

N: In what context do you most desire your work to be consumed? I know you have published numerous books and I wonder if the intimacy of physically encountering your work is an intended outcome, as opposed to the sterility and forced distance of the white cube?

A: These days, it all feels like a compromise. I wish I could just get on with my life and not exhibit or publish, but I am condemned to find an impossible balance between life and giving an account of my acts. This impossible point is what I pursue and I’ll use anything that can help me to fit the purity of experience and logics of ideology into each one of my actions. Books, exhibitions, drugs, encounters are all just tools to me. Without any hierarchy, without any craftsmanship, without any illusion.

N: In more recent years, you have opened up your practice to include film. What are the limitations of photography as a visual language? What flexibility has film provided you, and how has it changed your relationship to the subjects or situations in front of the camera?

A: The last few years, I have not known what to do with photography. It became too simple, too easy, and too obvious. Film brings me back to dealing with reality, in its more imperfect and more frustrating aspects. While filming, I have to take into account the intensity and truth of situations. Filming generates a language dependent upon truth, while photography fast becomes a game, a lie made out of shades and shapes. I create my own destiny through stimulation of the senses, through excess, and try to develop a language that is appropriate to describe the process. Film became a more meaningful way to speak about what I go through, a more powerful means to challenge the truth and intensity of relationships doomed to nothingness, that I relentlessly nourish to transform into some degenerated form of love. Photography is more of a solitary practice.

Filming is more of a common language developed trough the generous and prolific affirmation of existence imposed by the girls themselves. They share more, embracing fully the excitement, nervousness and danger of facing a more straightforward and honest live camera. Most of all, they accept the challenge of speaking up to the camera, of revealing unveiled aspects of their mental and emotional states, of their relation to me, to men, to the violence of the world. Filming proves itself a fuller and purer experience of sharing bits and pieces of life, but the technical and financial pressure is great; the economy of working with film, the necessity to fund projects, to work with a team of people more qualified than I’ll ever be with cinematographic techniques makes it an almost impossible task.

N: I have often heard your work described of as dark or violent, which to me are terms that lack granularity. What do darkness and violence mean to you and what other words might you use to describe your work?

A: To reinvent a very ordinary destiny, I was bound to lose control, to throw myself into the unknown, into the obscure margins of city life. Considering the logic of my research, this loss into darkness was probably essential and I ended up learning from, loving, desiring, and respecting the beings that inhabit those dark territories. The darkness you speak about, I see as a luminous, generous, dignified land. The women I photograph are saints, heroes, myths, whatever you want to call them. But they are the only beings I can think of who live their life to the extent of their humanity. They are the last human beings in a world of cowards and cynics. This is what darkness is made from...sparkles of life in a world of illusions.

Its possible I’ve never been as close as I am now to what I consider a decent way of living, by my own rules and standards, and among people I consider my own. But plunging into the raw flesh of humanity means intelligence will progressively vanish, and the intuitive violence of the animalistic necessity to survive, to sense, to exist will slowly take over. My images are generated by an overwhelming and omnipresent violence, but this violence is never aimed at the women I photograph. It is a violence that, even though it often harms its own authors, exists only as an antidote and a response to the economical and institutional violence against the invisible community of those who have nothing. The work is deeply political…photography is only a matter of gestures, not the art of the gaze, but the art of position, of action, of life. This untenable position I am seeking to stand for is my statement, my credo, my standard, my logic and my method.

N: In your artist statement you assert, “Bestiality is the ultimate rampart against the anesthesia of senses and the mindset of a society that defines objects and people as commodity.” How do your encounters with the women you photograph subvert the acts of commodification, fetishization and objectification that so often riddle the traditions of portraiture or reportage?

A: I have never shown any pretense to any kind of purity or perfection. But I don’t see the beings I photograph as subjects, models, victims or citizens. I desire them, I love them, I let them hurt me, and I let them seek revenge if they are too far lost in their own pain to recognize me as a possible ally. I know the tragedy of their existence, the depth of the horror they experience on any given day. I tell them how much I expect from them and how much I am willing to give in return, and none of them should have any reason to follow me, or let me follow them, but they do, almost always, because in that horrifying world ruled by strength and profit, humanity is the last secret key to solidarity, compassion, and comradeship—all ridiculous or forbidden words.

To say it in an ugly way, I photograph prostitutes who are far gone, who because of AIDS, addiction or alienation are out of reach from the desires of common men, from commerce of the flesh, from social mainstream communication…we communicate on the single ground of common addictions. Junky solidarity, that’s what saves me from becoming a photographing asshole…

N: You’ve also said, “Adrenaline and pheromones are remedies to social lies in the void left behind by the standardization of consciousness.” Am I right in asserting that adrenaline and pheromones have become lifelong obsessions for you? What lesser-known obsessions do you have and how does photography help you to explore those?

A: My one and only obsession is to make the best out of my existence. To keep struggling to be alive, to not surrender to fear, to keep searching for every unknown way to experience the nonsense of life through my own senses, to keep being excited and scared, to keep taking risks, to keep provoking encounters which force me to choose a political and intimate position, to keep inventing my own life as I would write fiction, and to live up—through gestures—to my words and beliefs.

My own private obsessions, desires, background and traumas don’t mean much to me…At least, I try to ignore them and live up to the pain of the ones who accept me into their world. That’s my way of being social…No narcissism, no self-indulgence, no interest in my own little burdens. In that way, I live a very militant, or sacerdotal life…I see my practice as a very demanding choice, which basically comes down to being a mere sacrifice. But sacrificing oneself for what you believe in is more than foolish or terrorist logic; it is what I see as living in a dignified way, as trying to be a decent human being.

N: Let’s move on to your private life, if that is something you own or believe in. In many ways, you embody the term global citizen and have made numerous countries your home, including England, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Japan and Mexico. How does traveling—possibly even escapism—inspire or affect your practice? Which places have you lived in or traveled to recently, and what about them was most attractive to you?

A: I haven’t had a base for nine years. I live in hotels. Faced with the difficulty of financially surviving, the physical exhaustion, I remain a nomad. Of course I am conscious that part of this capacity to move through the world’s circles and borders comes from the incapacity to confront more stable paths, spaces or relationships. I became a handicapped person in many ways but, even though it differentiates me from the people I photograph, this can be very painful. I chose to preserve and nourish my freedom…I paid the high price over the years for this liberty to draw my own destiny, and I won’t give it up for anything I can think of. I just sometimes choose to take more time, to take more care, to accept the responsibilities generated by friendship, or simply to loose myself deeper in some more somber or more exalting addiction.

The place dearest to my heart these days remains Phnom Penh. There I no longer feel like a stranger, and I immerse myself deeper into the violence of the world, drawing the force to continue from the shared experience of a desperate desire. There I find a fragile solace for the slow decrease of my strength to act. The acute awareness of still being alive. I improvise my life, which gradually resembles an exercise in overtaking art, or the fulfillment of an ancient utopia; the abolition of speech in favor of what is lived.

N: How did your time living in New York and studying photography at ICP in the mid-nineties evolve or change your practice? And whom did you meet there—aside from mentors Nan Goldin and Larry Clark—that changed the way you saw the world?

A: To me, New York was a break, a breath…the city gave me the strength and energy to keep going. Living there gave me the opportunity to see the beast from within, to understand, or at least feel, its intimate logics, its emotional and cultural background. To live within a society that I condemn as a political entity and negative economic force has proved useful over the years, in expanding my understanding of cruelty, banality, naivety and cynicism. I understood that good sentiments hardly, if ever, translate into meaningful actions. I understood that comfort is the worst possible way of life. I understood that fearless desire generates armies of morons, and that fear without desire gives birth to generations of slaves. I understood that you couldn’t listen to your heart, mind or body and have to venture deep inside the dark territories of instinct.

I chose the dark side of things, resisted the refined temptations of economical and moral well-being and doing good. I renewed my old allegiance to the world of misfits, outcasts and degenerates…I kept exploring social territories humanly damaged by the economical process that allows American society to feed and reproduce itself over the condemnation of entire rejected or negated communities.

N: And then you took a break from photography. What did you get up to next?

A: I studied photography when I was thirty and stopped photographing when I was thirty-two. Then, I was working long shifts to raise two baby girls born in 1994 and 1995. I started to photograph again when I was thirty-six or thirty-seven. Two daughters were born since, but I never stopped shooting after that.

N: What role have your four daughters played in your life? You mention in past interviews needing a tether to reality at times to achieve balance, and that proximity to war has served as one form of therapy for you in this way. Do your daughters also help to ground you?

A: They do. They are part of this fragile balance, even though they should not be. I should be the one providing them with arms and ammunitions. But they know I live by my own rules. They know it’s a loosing deal for all of us, as a family. I believe they understand, in some strange way, and respect my intimate agenda. I am forever indebted to them.

N: Do you believe in love? I guess I’m not after a definition of romantic love here, but rather a description of the possible forms with which it manifests in your life.

A: I could say that the only form of love I consider valid is whatever subtle mix of lust and understanding two or more people share in any given moment, that doesn't need or require any type of payment, consolation, compensation, or reward of any type, be it financial, social, intellectual or emotional. But love is the opposite of all proposed definitions; it is something that won’t make sense, but sticks to you and to others, something you can’t get rid of, against all odds and logic. Love is most beautiful when it doesn’t make sense…So let’s not try to make sense out of it…

N: And what about death? Do you think the act of aging and nearing a more finite definition of death will slow you down in any way? Or do you perceive of death the same way you do other obstacles to self and consciousness, as something to be confronted head on?

A: Photographing, as any other human activity, only makes sense when confronted with the threat of death, or at least its presence or ineluctability. Life then definitely takes on more weight, more responsibility. Provoking other experiences, other intensities, confronting my doubts and my contradictions, documenting the slow decay of the body with the little time left is what I am busy with these days, photographing less and less, struggling more and more. A loose journey, a slow kind of agony exhibited for all to see, a form of true liberty.

I observe the fading breath, the nervous system's shut down, the weakening of the organs. While fewer pictures are taken, while the takes become sparser, more painful, I’m aware I’ve never felt so peaceful. I am slowly becoming at peace with others, and with myself while struggling to keep the risks high, the fear intense, and the desire genuine, without feeling ashamed anymore of being compassionate. While the flesh little by little dissolves in the shadow of death, the soul becomes brave, because it was made not to fear, not to ignore, not to forget, not to shy away from that absurd void surrounding us.

N: And what or whom do you think awaits you in the afterlife? Does your constant pursuit of utopia here on earth in some way acknowledge that there are mental and physical limits to enlightenment?

A: I never wished or believed to trespass any limits by my own. It is all about the limits. It is not about getting anywhere. It is about not giving up trying. There is nowhere to get to, no secret to unveil, no magic territory to walk through but the territory of our own fear. It’s all about walking straight, about wanting to feel the pain until the very last minute, refusing wrong ways of escape, inglorious aesthesis, lame defeat of the soul through ideology and religion, shameful comfort of the senses, or the hypnotic efficiency of the spectacle. It’s all about reinventing one’s own destiny every day, beyond reason…

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Born in Marseilles, Antoine d'Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. During his time in New York, in 1991-92, D'Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005. In 2004 D'Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World's Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo. Since 2005 Antoine d'Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.